New companies with investment money
Project environment
These projects tend to be technology intensive where a large part of the company’s revenue stream is generated online.
Pressure
In addition to having a quick time to market there is a lot of pressure on the management team to proof the business concept to the investors. As the project manager you have to know when investment meetings are scheduled to ensure that the project progress is aligned with expectations of the investors and the internal business owner(s) doing the presentations.
Operational issues
- The company is still growing and therefore often completely understaffed. That means pressure on everyone.
- In preparation you should keep:
- A list of freelance designers, copy-writers, front-end developers and developers – in case you need some help
- Establish who is responsible for quality assurance – with any luck there will be a dedicated person – but assume that you will do most of the QA before the project goes live.
- Define gaps in the organisational structure and question assumptions.
An example. What’s the responsibility delineation for the website?
Business owners:
- Marketing manager – responsible for the definition, management, driving, success metrics and analysis of campaigns.
- Website manager – responsible for creating, maintaining content and the overall strategy of the website.
- Interaction designer – responsible for the user experience, design and look and feel.
- Project manager – responsible for planning, timelines, scheduling resources and managing digital projects.
So how does it work when you run the marketing campaign on the homepage of your site? Who gets to make the decisions?
- Overall the marketing manager should have the final decision in this case but the interaction designer and website manager must be able to change elements if it does not conform to the brand styleguide.
- As the project manager you should make sure that everyone agrees on how they work together and it may fall to you to put this in a formal document. Start-up companies generally don’t have human resource managers but hopefully the operations manager would have defined it for you.
Processes and procedures
- Come to terms with the fact that there won’t be any and that you probably won’t have time to generate the documentation on how it should work – especially in the first year of the company starting up. But that does not mean that you cannot prepare for it.
- Hopefully you would have a set of general documentation ready to present it to the company and fill in the gaps.
- Talk to the development manager and lead designer, get them to formalise and document the process they use within their teams.
- Then get them to document how they want the project managers to interact with their teams
- How they want development and design to interact
- The development manager should map out the go-live procedure, programming environments (development, UAT, production etc)
Phew! That was a quick brain-dump on my experiences with start-up companies. I hope you found at least some of the information useful.