“We are taking apart each task and sending it around to who can do it best, and because we are in a virtual environment, people need not be physically adjacent to each other, and then we reassemble all the pieces back together …”
This quote is from The World is Flat. It is in reference to the Accounting profession, but is applicable to web development as well. The services provided by Web professionals can be disaggregated, distributed, produced and reassembled with amazing efficiency.
As the web has matured and increased in importance, the skills and level of expertise of those responsible for the web has changed as well. A professional web presence now requires a multidisciplinary team with expertise in many areas. The days of a single ‘webmaster†responsible for a site is gone. Instead, web design and development has been split into specific disciplines including visual design, content creation, information architecture, interaction design, computer programming, html programming, database design and more.
I have created a diagram outlining the roles of a large web team. Each of these positions has the appropriate formal education and experience in their specialty. As pressure to control costs increases, senior management will be looking for opportunities to get specialized skills as inexpensively as possible. It may well be that many of our services will be outsourced in the relatively near future. If the fast food industry can outsource their drive-though order taking process, anything is possible.
Your thoughts?
Hi Mark, I am interested in your diagram of the large web team. You have some great ideas there about how to divide the work. However, it looks to me like your producer is going to be a major bottleneck if that person is also the project manager. I think you’re going to want to have another set of “child” functions that allow for 1+ project managers…and maybe no one even reports to them (that would be best). I’m making this suggestion based on experience…!