How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team
As many of you know, I have been managing our church’s website for the past few months. It was not an easy project as all my designers and programmers have a full time job and this was going to be on the side kind of a job. I was asked to build a team of web and graphic designers who would eventually help in building a website. As soon as I was handed the reins of this job, I had a few people on my mind and called all of them and they turned down the opportunity to serve. I was pretty bummed and I just advertised on the church bulletin hoping for lady luck to lie on my side. I got a good response and made me excited. There were many who wanted to help out in this project. But the question was how many would be ideal? Would too many cooks spoil the broth?
In the first two months I recognized four people who were committed to helping out in this project. One was a graphic designer, two were programmers and the other was a graphic designer, web designer and a flash programmer. My job was to recognize the work to be done, divide it up and share it so none of them feel burdened. It was a tricky situation.
I gave all the graphic work to the graphic designer on the team. His job was to create the graphics only for the website. I recognized some projects that could be worked independently like the calendar and other addons and divided it among the programmers. Once I had the website layout with graphics, the web designer cum graphic designer, created the style sheets for it and worked on the flash.
Although the project is still not completely done, it is worth mentioning that managing the manpower on a web team is extremely important. Here are some things to follow :
1. Know your team well in terms of speed, efficiency and commitment.
2. Try to divide the work equally so none of them are bored to death.
3. Make an impact on your team as a leader.
4. Recognize some parts of the project which are mutually exclusive and distribute those kinds of job.
5. Have just one graphic designer do the entire design but have others to critique on it.
6. Be in the know how of all scheme of things. Make sure you know everything about the project coz you are gonna be questionable.
7. Encouragement is the key. Encourage your team for what they have done and sometimes exaggeration could be a problem.
I was inspired by this article. That article is more technical and I just wanted to share my experience with you guys. If you have any questions regarding managing a team, let me know… If you believe that I could have managed in a different way, let me know as well…
