Customer Reviews

Collaborative Web Development: Strategies and Best Practices for Web Teams

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Give Jessica Burdman credit for concept and the wealth of practical tools, techniques and insights. This is an excellent book, especially for those who are trying to transfer their knowledge/skills from another field.

I'm in the process of working with writers and project managers who are coming from the more traditional publishing world. They are hungry for prescriptive formulas, guidelines, templates and checklists. This book (and CD) has them. They also want streamlined overview information about the technical side (the stuff they are really scared about), and this book has that too. I have seen nothing else like this book and for the moment the material is still fresh and relevant.

Ms. Burdman has lots of real life experience and her writing shows it. The anecdotal information and the interviews that are included further support the practical impact. Where the book begins to fall apart is that the interviews are not representative enough of the rest of the world. Many of the cited people fall into a small circle that she is acquainted with. IMHO, this dilutes the material's impact.

Also, given that this book is about a world that moves really quickly, Burdman's publisher made a big mistake in handling the resource information in the appendix. The software products cited are already out of date, and with each day this type of information becomes more and more irrelvant. It would have been better to point readers to an on-line resource center that is kept up-to-date.

If you are hardcore and have been doing work like this for years, this book is not for you. If you are looking for an organized and practical framework to use if you've been shooting from the hip, the book does the trick. Absolutely essential reading for the novice web project manager!

This is an excellent book for the person charged with managing a web development project for the first time, but who already has solid experience in project management per se. There are five areas in particular that are covered by the author which are quite helpful:
1) the roles and responsibilities of the individual members of the project team,
2) an overview of the planning process that should precede any web site production,
3) a framework for communication between team members, third-party suppliers and the client,
4) how to build quality assurance into web project development, and
5) a comprehensive guide to useful resources on the web.

While a previous reviewer criticized the comprehensive resource guide as a mistake, pointing out that these resources are mostly out of date, I see it as a positive and laudable effort to introduce the web's fundamental strength (that of linking to other resources) into traditional media. This in essence is what the author means by "collaborative web development": a direct collaboration between team members, third-party suppliers and the client and an indirect collaboration with other suppliers through resources and technologies available via the web. More authors should follow suit!

My search for books on Managing a Web Team turned up only two books, this one and "Web Site Engineering". Since this one arrived first, I read it first.

It is a quick, easy read, and has some valuable information in it that is not easily found elsewhere, even on the web. Few web books address dealing with the client, the care and feeding of the web team, and quality assurance, but this one does. Topics that I would have liked to have seen covered in more detail are configuration managment, the design process, and the development environment.

This book is written for web project managers to-be. I don't believe it will be very useful to experienced project managers. This book is good for people transitioning to web project manager / producer positions. I have several years of marketing management experience and am about to start a web producer position. So this book provided a good basic overview of web project management principles. For a rigorous treatment of navigation, design, info architecture, and other essential topics, I suggest you rely on O'Reilly as so many Amazon web category reviewers have done.

I gave this book four stars because it is so thorough (truly a mile wide and an inch deep). But it doesn't get 5 stars because it was so poorly edited. Every chapter includes glaring grammatical mistakes, and in some cases even spelling errors. I question whether the editor (Elizabeth Spainhour) ever read this book!

Jessica Burdman has written Collaborative Web Development to assist companies to establish a team concept of Web development. She offers a sound blueprint for Web development that will allow a number of creative individuals to make their own contributions and for companies to better manage every stage of development from beginning to end.

Burdman lays down a solid foundation for establishing a serious Web development team. She identifies key team members and their individual responsibilities, she will assist project managers to break down and assign specific project responsibilities, and she will help companies to better manage their people and business policies. Burdman offers noteworthy advice on handling client matters such as payments, their involvement in the Website design process, dealing with roadblocks, thorny issues, and meeting deadlines.

A central theme emphasized throughout the book is good communication at all levels of development. Burdman will assist companies large and small to work through the many issues they will face, including many that will stretch their patience thin. The accompanying CD contains a number of helpful demoware development programs and other essential tools to meet a variety of Web development needs. Highly recommended for any Web design and consulting business environment!

Particularly considering the wide variation this can take I think this book does an excellent job of describing theissues and problems that need to be dealt with for a web team leader. I thought the the Case Studies were particularly well done and the profiles were generally quite interesting also. I think this will be a competitive book. As web projects get larger and more complex team building and management will become more important. This book is well aimed at this growing market.

I have actually found the book to be quite useful as I've reviewed it, I am personally involved in a start-up large scaledevelopment project and some of the issues raised and profiles have been very instructive.

I found this book practically worthless; I had hoped it would cover and the table of contents seemed to indicate that it would have practical advice in the following areas:

- a web development methodology: it doesn't at all - it vaguely even covers a process - techniques for successful implementation: it doesn't it provides some moderatley useful guidance, but hardly techniques that provide a foundation for best practices - examples/recommendations of appropriate standards that should be adopted: few if any recommendations were made and even funnier was the recommendations ofr tools, standards, and methods paragraph on page 79: I quote "Once you have taken a look at your communications structure, you can start to put some best practices into effect." That is it - that is the whole paragraph! - what are the challenges to developing a dynamic - data driven website with real applications: these are largely ignored or glossed over. This book focuses on typical "uploading content as static web pages" type projects.

I could rant on several more, but it woudl be pointless. There are some inconsistencies in advice - almost like the book was written at very different times, or by different people. Page 39 supposedly gives you guidance on managing virtual teams, but then page 182 says there is nothing more effective than basically doing MBWA (that's management by walking around - a type of management style advocated many moons ago by professionals and such...). Hmmm... how do I virtually walk around - needless to say, page 39 had not enough detail to help.

Recommendation: Save your money and forget this one, buy a standard software project management book focused on RAD/JAD development.

I'm a web project manager and this book helped me struggle through the initial years of my career. It's a good basic guide to what to do and what not to do in managing web projects, and it would be a good starting point for further research and study using other books, like Siegel's Secret of Successful Projects.

As the title point outs, this is a book about collaborative projects. It's a little thin on the formal techniques of project management, but it's unbeatable on the soft skills of web project management: building the right web team, and how to communicate with them and your clients.

I've used the knowledge I learnt in this books to manage web projects for European blue-chip clients, and it's one of the few books that I keep going back to, for web project management information.

Collaborative Web Development shares the common and not so common pitfalls of building, maintaining and managing web teams. Matrix managment is today's managment style for many web projects and the book helps, alot. Jessica's approach delivers a fast reading, informative handbook approach to keeping ahead of the web development curve. The CD provides fast access to problems and possible solutions.

Here's the template you need to run your team. Jessica does a good job drawing from her experiences to avoid some of the common pitfalls. Don't try to reinvent the wheel by trial and error project management--go read the book & follow her sage advice to improve your likelihood of project success.