Websites are all too often regarded as projects that are done when a site is launched. This is rarely the case. In most cases, the life of a site is just starting when it is being launched. A large part of total expenses happen only after the launch. In addition, it's important to remember that any website is just causing expenses for an organization as long as it's under development. All value creation with a site happens only after users actually have access to it.

Companies don't do projects - people do projects. It is essential to keep this in mind when selecting a supplier. Even though a particular company has done exceptional projects in the past, the future success has ultimately to do with the competence of individuals taking part in the project. Companies can create the culture, process and also have the support in place for greatly enhancing the possibility to do successful projects but still the actual results depend on the individuals actually involved.

Project goals: Why, not How

The most important factor when starting a project is to define the goals of the project clearly. A goal doesn't have to be complex, it is often better to try to keep the description of a goal in a few lines of text, pictures or drawings. Project goals should clearly state why the project is being done, but ideally should not address the issue of how the goals should be reached. If the exact implementation method is fixed in the goal of the project, it can make the actual implementation process immensely more difficult and thus more expensive. Since Drupal, or any other system based on ready-made functionality, offers a huge variety of different possible implementation methods, it is much more sensible to approach the project from the point of view of the goals and leave the studying of more detailed ways of implementation (how) for later.

Project goals should be clear enough for entire project team to fully understand and simple enough to be used in project communication to external parties. Based on the project goals we should also be able to set criteria that will be used to measure if project is successful or not.

We have written a manual on how to do Drupal projects together with our clients. The goal of this manual is to help our clients manage large Drupal projects and work efficiently in multi-vendor environments. The manual has been split in two parts where the first part is for project managers, producers and business owners of web sites. In the first part we cover the entire process from starting the project and ending up to maintenance and version updates. The second part of the manual is for developers and it covers common best practices on Drupal development.