At the jboye08 conference, Ben Knudsen from the Danish Red Cross did a presentation on the benefits of putting in place a web strategy. He described the day-to-day issues that their web site had faced due to not having a strategy and coined the concept “evil projects”.

An “evil project” is a project that results in web features which are of benefit neither to the organisation, nor to the web site visitors. The purpose of such a project is merely to promote a specific business unit, department or manager within the organisation. The web team is put under pressure to promote the project from a prominent place on the front page – often by the department manager (who happens to play tennis, football or golf every week with a VP in the organisation…).

Our local Red Cross web team improved the ability to keep evil projects off their site by clearly defining the strategic purposes that all web site content must serve and subsequently getting top management sign-off on them.

In recent comments, my colleague Janus Boye warned against costly strategy processes which don’t create value and end up killing sense of purpose. The risk of postponing actual benefits realisation indefinitely and of writing a strategy that will live eternally at the bottom of a drawer is very real. Also, I do have much respect for the ground-breaking methodical work that Australian intranet expert James Robertson has done on developing conceptual tools for a tactical, fast-paced approach to web development and web project management.

However, to me, web strategy consists of much more than long-term planning and writing documents. While the written strategy document is of little value to anybody but the web department, many web managers have been able to get a clear mandate and peace to work thanks to the strategy process that they undertook. The ability to execute well (see Graham Oakes’ comment to one of the above mentioned blog posts) is very much dependent on your freedom to move ahead without being stopped over and over again by stakeholders with a merely political agenda, e.g. evil project proponents.

Do you recognise the “evil project” phenomenon? Attendees at Ben’s presentation certainly did and whenever I speak of evil projects to web project managers, they smile knowingly. Have you found good ways to combat them? Or do you just have a good anecdote about evil projects? Then please share them with me – if nothing else, I can at least join you in having a loud, if slightly desperate, laugh.

May the Force be with you!

Tags: strategy, web project management

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 10:52 am and is filed under Blogpost. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.