Investing in Your eCommerce Project Where it Counts...

Have you ever sat on an airplane and wondered how many times the pilot has flown the plane? How many times they've taken off successfully, maneuvered through turbulence, and landed intact and at the right airport?

However, do you notice that no one ever starts their air travel experience hearing "Good afternoon everyone, please welcome your pilot Roy. Today is Roy's first flight, and we have all the confidence that Roy is going to get us where we're going, on time, and in one piece." Inevitably, somewhere there is Pilot Roy flying his first commercial flight, but we, as passengers, never seem to ask if we're the ones sitting on that plane.

Within an eCommerce site redesign and re-platform project your Project Manager is that critical role, they are your "Pilot." Yet, very rarely do people ask us about our Project Management team in an eCommerce strategy. When they do, the questions typically lean toward eCommerce analytics, methodologies and tools, instead of experience and successful implementations. Now take this back to the previous example, this would be the equivalent of me asking "Roy" how high he intends to fly the plane and which compass he may use to tell me the direction we're headed. Mind you these are fair questions, but my curiosity lends to that bigger questions of whether Roy has done this before and how that flight turned out.

Your Project Manager's job is to navigate you through the process, utilize the various necessary resources along the way, handle the "bumps" that every project inevitably hits, execute eCommerce solutions and ultimately launch your project successfully on the day "that sales" guy promised you.

So, with this person being so critical to your success, what should you be looking for? A successful Project Manager at Groove Commerce is someone who:

• Understands eCommerce marketing and the reason a Client has engaged with Groove Commerce
• Knows the foundational goals of the project
• Realizes the necessary resources to complete the project
• Provides a plan that gets the Client to that point of completion
• Possesses a strong degree of eCommerce consulting, providing guidance to a Client
• Communicates with the client about where things stand and what they need in order to continue with the project

With those fundamental elements in mind, here's how you should evaluate your potential Project leadership:

• Comfort Level - Can you establish a rapport with this person?
• Confidence Level - Do you feel this person can help "push" you and consult you, sometimes at the same time?
• Competence - Does this person understand why you are engaging in this eCommerce project?

At the end of the day, the joke remains the sales guy disappears the day you sign the contract. While that sentiment isn't completely fair, it is that person's job to move on and seek out new revenue opportunities. Thus leaving you in this arranged marriage with your Project Manager for the next several months.

I can tell you that 90% of projects we take on as "Magento Rescue Projects" originally failed because a Client lost faith in one of the key evaluation criteria of their Project Leadership and as a result they didn't feel confident they had the "Pilot" that could land them successfully.

So, I'll let you decide whether you intend to peer into the cockpit next time you're boarding a plane and ask for resumes and stats from your Pilot. But, if you're going to redesign and develop an entirely new eCommerce presence you need to know who's at the wheel, after all, your business depends on it.

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