”Talk to your system integrator”

This advice comes from Anne Sørensen from Aarhus University, who has just launched a new major web portal about the history of Denmark on danmarkshistorien.dk. I caught her just one week after the launch to a chat about working with system integrators; about crashing on the day of launch; content delivery from more than 35 different people with no web experience and about future challenges.

With a Ph.D. in history and no technical experience, Anne Sørensen is not the typical web project manager. Nonetheless she has been in charge of the prestigious project for 2,5 years and taken the website from idea to reality.

Q: What has been the biggest challenge as a non-technical project manager running a web project?

“Achieving an ongoing understanding between the involved parties. As the project manager I had to coordinate activities involving both professional historians delivering content, system integrators and IT. Especially with regards to the system integrator. Where we as historians think logical, thematic coherence, system integrators think databases and relations. So make sure you allow yourself enough time to talk to your system integrator!”

Q: How would you describe the collaboration with the system integrator?

“Generally it was good, even though we have had a few misunderstandings at busy times. The big challenge was the limited budget due to the way the project has been funded. We have continuously revised the scope and this has required some serious change management and willingness to make compromises.”

Q: With regards to content you have more than 35 distributed contributors. What have you done to ensure that the content was homogeneous and web friendly?

“Our normal way of writing definitely had to be changed. We usually write for highly-esteemed, scholarly magazines for readers like ourselves. Now we had to focus a lot more on actually telling the stories. We achieved this with thorough internal reviews and sparring. It has been a huge task to make all content web friendly.”

Q: Just after the launch on May 14th 2009 the site crashed. Could that have been avoided?

“Just prior to launch we got a lot of unexpected attention from the press with elaborate mentions on the radio, TV, newspapers and even on tele-text. This meant that in less than 2 days, we had more than 750.000 hits, whereas the most popular page on the university website usually gets around 10.000 hits a day. So we didn’t have anything to compare with and as it turned out, the hardware setup wasn’t up to this challenge.

We dedicated all resources to fix it, and we had to shut off all visitors from outside the university. To communicate this setback, we issued a press release and that took some of the pressure of my telephone.“

Q: What are the plans going forward and what do you see as the main challenges?

“We would love to implement some web 2.0 features to involve the users. Especially a forum for history teachers and a blog to comment on the contemporary history would be great additions. Unfortunately, the resources haven’t been there yet. Hopefully it will get easier to get funding now the site is live and stakeholders can see the benefits for themselves. We expect that the university will continue to invest in the website, now that it’s obvious how much interest it attracts and how useful the site is.

An English version would also be great, so we could become the online resource about Danish history. In general we don’t see ourselves as competitors to encyclopaedias like Wikipedia. Instead, we see ourselves as a resource where history is explained and put into a relevant context. The overall ambition is to become the preferred resource about Danish history and the place to go when you need inspiration or knowledge.”

Advice for non-technical web project managers
Many web project managers are not very technical, as it is the case with Anne Sørensen. If you find yourself leading a web project without having the required technical insights, my best advice is:

1. Talk to other practitioners and hear about their experiences
2. Make sure you and the system integrator are talking the same language e.g. about what a good user experience is, like Anne emphasized above
3. Good project management is much more important than technical issues

What do you see as the major challenges being a non-technical web project manager?

Full disclosure: Aarhus University is a member of the J. Boye Community of Practice.