Real Web Project Management: Case Studies and Best Practices from the Trenches

The Invisible Team Member

In addition to designers, developers, and QA testers, your project team contains a silent but powerful player who can determine the destiny of every project: the company's organizational structure. Most employees of a corporation are prisoners of the “org chart.” As functional specialists, the scope of their activities is limited to well-defined parameters. Designers design. Salespeople sell. Sure, they'll have input into how the designing and selling gets done, all right—when they make director in six years!

Project managers can take advantage of their “fuzzy” role to advance their vision of best practices. As inventors and enforcers of process and protocol, project managers are uniquely positioned to recommend and ...