Web Portals: Changing Business - Part 1

In my last piece about web portals I gave a brief introduction into what they are and some examples of how they can be applied in various business situations, if you haven’t read this then don’t worry, I’ll provide a bit of background before I begin.

Web portals are places on the internet where you can share information with other people in a secure and structured environment. They can be as simple or advanced as you need them to be and provide real benefits to small, medium and corporate enterprises by centralising business information, keeping it safe and backed up automatically and allowing people to access information and tools from anywhere in the world over the internet.

Web portals are places on the internet where you can share information with other people in a secure and structured environment

Portals are a means of bringing people together and businesses will often have a separate portal for each of their stakeholders, for instance a client portal for the delivery of information and services to their customers or a company portal to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing within the organisation. Web technology is extremely flexible and if implemented correctly, a portal can be the solution to any information management or communication limitations you have in your organisation, the trick is identifying what these limitations are in the first place.

Portals are a means of bringing people together...

My business has been using portal technology in various guises for the past four years to address a number of business issues with varying degrees of success. The level of success, as with any solution, has been down to the way they were designed and implemented, for the purpose of this article however, we will be focussing on the more successful implementations, the intricacies of deployment and change management is a story for another time.

Bespoke software development has always been one of our core business services; designing, programming and deploying software solutions for businesses around the UK. These projects often last several months and involve a team of developers, a project manager and an account manager within our organisation, several external agencies (design and marketing for example) and of course the client themselves, typically with multiple representatives. As this division developed a number of issues arose which threatened our ability to deliver on these large projects, the need for management time rocketed to maintain the efficiency and professionalism we prided ourselves on as well as to meet increasing demands on relationship management. The key issues were:

Asset tracking and version control

When marketing meets design meets the web you find yourself with a number of logos, images and copy evolving on a daily basis to meet the requirements of a customer understandably particular about how their business is being portrayed. Tight control over the versions of these assets is essential, nothing demoralises a customer more than a previously discarded logo being rolled out to their site and the whole process is almost impossible if done via email alone.

Document Collaboration and Publishing

The larger the project, the more the proposal becomes a collaborative roadmap agreement than a one way quote submission from supplier to customer and as such large documents can end up being sent back and forth, to an fro between multiple parties with one poor soul having to merge comments and changes from several responses. Over the course of the project this can become very time consuming and how many times have you had to trawl painfully through old emails for the final proposal when it reaches its closing stages?

Regular Meetings and Decision Minuting

The single most important element of project management is maintaining regular communication and recording all decisions that are made. It becomes impractical to get all parties round a table at regular intervals throughout the project and nigh on impossible to keep everyone abreast of the decisions that were made, the consequences of not doing so however can be catastrophic.

Time Management and Scheduling

By their nature projects come with strict deadlines and milestone dates, making sure all parties are aware and available can be tricky in itself, let alone when these dates change as is the inevitable nature of projects, regardless of how well they are planned and implemented.

In part 2 I will be explaining how the portal solution we implemented helped us take our software projects to a new level and that by addressing these issues we identified the most desirable features for portal buyers until this day. Until then, good bye!

Dan Hancock, Operations Director