Growing your ecommerce store and achieving your business goals requires executing an array of ecommerce projects, which takes time, effort, and resources.
Managing your projects well, however, helps you avoid missing critical deadlines and complicating your stakeholder collaboration, which can hurt your operations, sales, and profits.
If you’re wondering how your ecommerce project management should go, here are seven tips to help you do that and achieve your business goals.
1. Set specific performance goals and metrics.
Some of the first things you should do to run your projects well is to determine your objectives and the ways to achieve them.
Set specific and feasible goals with measurable performance metrics.
If you’re starting a blog, for instance, your goals can be to:
- Write at least one blog post every week;
- Increase your traffic by 5 percent every month;
- Publish a 3000-word guide by the middle of the year, and others.
Identify your performance goals and metrics to have clearer direction for decision-making, choosing your strategies and priorities, and more throughout your project lifecycle.
2. Plan your methodology.
There are two known project management methods you can refer to and employ for your business.
The Lean kind is ideal for handling long-term company projects and improving your efficiency and resource management.
It begins by defining your project flow, deliverables, and other factors, measuring and evaluating inputs, analyzing data, identifying resource wastage, and improving and finalizing the process.
For example, use this method in projects that test out a new website design for 30 days, with a step for conducting an SEO audit, and others.
From this test project, determine aspects of your site design you need to change, add, or remove, and more, before finalizing it.
On the other hand, the Agile method is best for short-term product development projects, as well as for deciding quickly on the most suitable manner of meeting targets.
It is an iterative process that starts with designing your project or product, building it, and configuring and testing before releasing.
The Agile methodology helps you spot flaws and areas for improvement, allowing you minimize resource waste.
Following one methodology all-encompassingly can be difficult, though, so modify some procedures or combine processes to find a framework that suits your team and business model.
3. Select the right management tools.
Streamline your tasks and increase your efficiency with the right project management tools to go with various aspects of your project.
Use project scheduling software programs, for instance, to help you organize and keep track of your project implementation.
These programs can even assist in integrating relevant activities and increasing transparency among your stakeholders and team members.
Collaboration software tools, on the other hand, facilitate a more seamless workflow through a consolidated platform for discussions, documentation, assignments, file sharing, and others.
Work with these kinds of tools to remain on top of your ecommerce projects and collaborate with your team efficiently.
4. Monitor your projects regularly.
Frequently monitoring your project management helps you achieve your business goals according to plan and on time.
If you’re working on a promotional campaign, for instance, monitoring helps you avoid making early marketing mistakes, correct them, and stay on track with your timeline, objectives, etc.
Monitoring also helps you validate the cost-efficient use of resources, assess your project status, and foresee possible impacts of present decisions, among others.
Regular project monitoring helps you ascertain your project is in the right direction toward realizing your business goals.
5. Define and organize your team’s roles.
Proper team coordination lets you deliver several outputs, complete activities, meet deadlines, and direct all efforts toward the end goals.
One way of maintaining constant team coordination is to define and organize their roles.
For instance, if you’re creating an ecommerce website, you should assign someone to manage and integrate your SEO efforts, another for web development, and more.
Doing that lets you streamline your supervision of responsibilities, task completion, and any errors arising from respective assignments.
6. Strategize your project execution.
With your goals and methodology planned out, you can strategize your project management in light of your business dynamics, routine, and other factors.
Ponder on these questions:
- How frequently will meetings be: daily, weekly, monthly? How many times in a given period?
- What is our project flow? What and how many phases are needed?
- What is the timetable for specific phases, milestones, submission of deliverables, and reports?
- Who performs which roles?
- What risks do we foresee encountering? How do we address them?
- What methods will we use for which project phase and assignment?
- Who approves which decisions?
- Which and how much resources will be necessary?
- How will our project develop over time? What changes can we anticipate? How should we respond to them?
- How many times must we evaluate our project implementation? What factors should we look at?
The answers to these questions can guide you and your team in planning the details of your project execution and monitoring.
7. Establish the best communication practices.
Applying good communication habits among your team and stakeholders prevents your project from being thrown off course.
For example, if you have too many stakeholders and they all give contradicting opinions, you end up creating numerous output revisions that are far from your original concept.
This leaves you and your team feeling stressed, confused, and paralyzed in finalizing your output or determining your next steps.
To avoid that mess, consult your most relevant stakeholders only, such as your highest-paying investor, CEO, and executives with technical industry knowledge.
Doing that simplifies your decision-making processes and enables you to move forward with your project implementation.
Reach your ecommerce goals with project management.
With these techniques and your consistent application of them, you can master ecommerce project management and reach your business goals in time.
When you manage your projects well, you create concrete plans, carry out suitable workflows, collaborate with people smoothly, and others.
You also grow your ecommerce store more efficiently, leading to a boosted brand image, improved customer engagement, spikes in conversions and revenues, and many more.