E-Commerce Upgrade?

With the advent of new personalization technologies and the integration of user-generated content, social networking, RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, multichannel interaction and Ajax-based user interfaces, online retailers are rushing to upgrade their e-commerce sites to provide better user experiences and increase customer acquisition, retention and loyalty. These upgrade projects can be large and often involve deploying a new e-commerce platform. The success of an upgrade project begins with a good project plan. However, unexpected events can happen, especially in large projects. Despite the perfect plan, a project can fall significantly behind schedule, resulting in a loss of time and money. The capacity to have visibility into unplanned issues and then adapt the plan to respond to these issues can enable the project manager to bring the project back on track -- and therein lies the challenge. Traditional project management tools were not designed for this since they enable you to create a good project plan -- that gets you 20 percent of the way -- and the rest depends on seamless execution, which they do not address. Challenges With Traditional Project Management Systems A desktop-based project management system is not well-equipped to drive flawless execution. Systems are usually designed for full-time program managers, and its complexity can be frustrating for line-of-business managers, for which managing projects is only one of the several things they do on a daily basis. An e-commerce project is likely to involve internal employees from IT, marketing and merchandising, as well as external consultants from the design agency and the e-commerce vendor. The project manager typically spends a few valuable hours every week chasing team members to gain visibility into the status of their tasks so they can establish the current status of the project. If there are any surprises, the manager creates a revised plan and then spends an inordinate amount of time communicating the new plan back to team members, so everyone knows the new schedule and due dates. This process alone can become a huge drain on time if the team is distributed across multiple time zones or organizations due to a combination of offshoring and outsourcing . The traditional project management tools were designed in a pre-Internet era, to be used by the project manager on their laptop/desktop. They do not have the capability to automatically query team members in the background and capture the status of their tasks, so when the manager looks at the project status, the project status is always up to date. Such a capability can free many hours every week from a project manager's busy schedule for higher value-added tasks.