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PM Support Website Requirements Checklist
Quick Summary
A requirements list and prioritization template created by a company planning an internal website to support its project managers and teams.
What this is
A template for listing and prioritizing requirements for an internal website to support project managers and teams. Created by a multi-site company as a way to explore and capture relative priorities of features and content to feed phased development of such a site for their PMs.
Why it's useful
This company had multiple development groups in different geographic locations, with between 20 and 40 project managers working in each location. Several of the divisions were the result of mergers with different companies.
The General Manager charged the heads of the various development groups to educate and support their project managers for maximum flexibility and capability. Her goal was that over time, any project manager could lead programs that spanned locations, as well as lead projects with currently unfamiliar technology—such as programs involving systems brought into the company via merger. This called for a level of knowledge exchange and ongoing support for the project managers across the country that did not exist.
A core group of project managers, already active in informal mentoring programs for new PMs in the company, banded together to suggest an internal website that would facilitate the necessary learning and ongoing support. This checklist is based on the requirements matrix the team created for surveying project managers in different locations about their needs, recording the resulting relative priorities of features for the site, and subsequently planning a phased development of the content and features needed.
How to use it
Follow these steps to think through the goals and potential users of your own site, and investigate detailed requirements and priorities, before launching into any project to develop the content and structure for such a site.
Consider what you believe your PM support website should deliver - what kinds of information and support, and to whom? Project managers only? Functional team members as well?
Identify other "prime movers" in your organization who would help champion the idea of this website, and get their opinions as well on these main goal and user questions.
Modify the enclosed requirements items to be appropriate for your environment and the goals determined above. You can also add worded survey questions if you wish.
Identify people within those groups of users the website would be designed to support, and ask them to fill out the requirements checklist and any related questions you have.
Alternately, or additionally, consider holding a group session where the potential requirements are discussed. Be sure to get concrete statements of benefits from the users. Sometimes projects such as these are treated as "nice to have" but not mandatory, and are thus easy to set aside when things get busy. The more you have statements from potential users about how such a site will save them time, mistakes, wasted effort, etc., the more success you'll have at launching and sustaining the project to create the site.
Compile the results from your surveys and meetings, including a prioritized list of features or groups of features accompanied by those strong statements of benefits from the users.
Use this prioritized feature list as you take the next steps to propose and plan an internal project to create a PM support site. For instance, your first proposal might be to develop a first simple site structure and several key pieces of content and links that map to the highest priority, highest benefit items identified by the potential users.
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