How to become a better buyer of web sites

This session is directed towards "Site owners", "Project managers" or general "Stakeholders" in relation to a website.

I have been working as a vendor for approximately 15 years and I have developed a quite interesting skill:

"I can tell upfront if a project will be good or bad for the client"

I actually don't think this is a unique skill for me, I do think that a lot of people can feel that something is not right here.

What we all see is usually the outcomes that can show up like this: "Legal conflicts around contracts", "Stress", "Overtime", "The feeling that you are out of control", "All website vendors seem to be bad", "No attention from vendors".  

This is not another “how to deliver projects on time session”. I will try to focus more on the long term value delivered by a website and how to do that in a work / life balanced way.

My goal is to inspire people to modernize how they work with websites, this session will question you, your work, your organisation and how you all work.

Are you brave enough to enter and are you brave enough to bring you boss?

If you don't know what your site is "worth for you organisation" or what you expect the web site to deliver in terms of value you risk doing a very bad job.

I often meet clients that has got a budget approvement from the board to do a web site, but they often completely miss what they expect this site to deliver. Budgets can be to high, but more often companies don't really understand how much value their website actually deliver for them. I will exemplify a bit around this.

We love to talk about details and we fill our requirement lists with details about how things has to be done! The problem? Well we are only guessing and even worse, we often forget to value what really comes out in the end. The thing we tend to focus on is if things are delivered or not. What if you could focus on the change you create and measure that? What do you do if all those requirements you worked on don't deliver any value for you organisation?

This relates the previous topic “the only thing you know is that don't know” and also explains why Agile methods like Scrum works if used correctly.

What we also need to understand is that if we focus on a project to hard we miss the long term value we need to deliver. We need to plan long term from a budget and a scope perspective.

You do that by delivering several small projects instead of a big bang project! You also need to be good at saying no!

Risk management in website projects tends to focus on the contract, where we love to mitigate as much risk as possible. However, if you buy in to the fact that "the only thing you know, is that you don't know" you will understand that trying to do that in a contracts actually stop you from being able to act on risk.  

Stakeholders…. CEO, CTO, “The visionary next to the CEO”, “The owner”, “The developer”. Everyone has opinions, usually the power of decisions tend to follow the organisation structure and the social structure attached to “After works” and even though your CEO doesn't know anything about websites he will have opinions about the colors of that menu! Can we handle that somehow?

I will try to summarize the learnings from above into how you can use that in your Procurements and how you run you sites for long term success!