1. Best Practices
  2. Project Objectives, Strategy, and Scope

Project Objectives, Strategy, and Scope

Project Overview in Brief

Objectives:

  • Clarify the website's purpose (e.g., increase awareness, streamline support). This will drive all the subsequent decisions you make for the project.
  • Determine how you will measure your success in meeting the objectives

Audience:

  • Identify primary and secondary audiences
  • Anticipate and research content needs (e.g., program info, access to tools, contact details).
  • Consider content delivery based on common device types and connectivity
  • Match the tone to audience expectations – formal or friendly.

Team Roles and Timeline:

  • Define team, team member responsibilities, project phases, and launch dates.
  • Allocate resources for content creation, accessibility checks, and ongoing maintenance.

Content:

  • Review existing content: update or archive as needed; outline what new content should be created and assign responsibility.
  • Identify intervals for updating content, and for posting events, news, and other timely content.

Compliance:

  • Follow university guidelines on branding, accessibility, privacy, and security.

Ongoing Changes:

  • Keep the project flexible for future iterations and improvements based on user feedback and analytics.

Plan your project in detail

Before starting the work of creating content for a new Queen’s website, it is important to outline your overarching communication strategy for the topic and your specific website objectives or goals. This will help develop a shared understanding within your unit or team of the nature and scope of the work to be done.

It is also very important, early on, to define roles and procedures for your project team, and to ensure that everyone understand their obligations to accessibility.

However you want to create documentation for the project, be sure to consider the expected complexity of your your site, the impact it will have on your audience and stakeholders, and your unit's or department's internal project approval process.

To ensure your project’s ultimate success, consult with and seek approval on the project’s objectives and direction from those who will be most impacted by your new website before you invest time on content design and creation and put it online.

Consider the following questions when developing your documentation:

Site objectives and audience needs

  • What do you want to communicate overall? A vision or mission statement is a good place to start but be sure to humanize it and connect it directly to potential outcomes of the website itself.

  • Who is your target audience?

  • What do you want our audience to know about your program, service, initiative, department...? i.e.:

    • Is there is something new being offered?
    • Is there external recognition to note (rankings, awards or achievements, graduation rate, employment stats)?
    • What differentiates your offering from that of other institutions?

  • What do we want to achieve through this site? e.g.:

    • improve awareness of service?
    • increase the number of applicants to a program?
    • reduce number of questions to staff, increase engagement in events?
    • improve communication with stakeholders?…

  • What other information will our user group expect to find online? e.g. a link to a login/tool, how to reach a real person…

  • What has changed since information was last published? Or, if this a new website, why launch it now?

  • Do you have secondary audiences to consider as well?

  • Is the information and method of communicating the same of different for each audience?

    • will you also be using social media channels, or a digital newsletter?
    • will your audiences be on laptops or smartphones?
    • will they have access to high-speed Internet services?

  • Will the information your audience seeks change through the year? How does the academic cycle influence your communication needs?

  • What tone is most appropriate for your website: formal, institutional, aspirational, engaging and friendly, casual…?

Team roles and process

  • Identify those who will be most affected by the website launch/relaunch and discuss the project.

  • Define your project timeline:

    • When will the work start and when will it end?
    • What is the best time to publish the new website?
    • Will you launch everything at once or in phases?
    • Do you have the resources to both build the project? i.e, web development support, writing, photography, videography, design
    • how much time will you require for accessibility checks, user feedback, and approvals?
    • Do you have the resources to maintain the website once it has launched?

  • Research and insights:

    • Do you have any research or statistics regarding your current site usage that will inform changes on a new site? i.e. analytics, surveys, help forms
    • How much new research and what new tools do you need to move measure success?

  • Managing the launch/re-launch:

    • Who needs to be consulted about what? Who will do what? Who needs to approve what?
      Consult with stakeholders and the digital governance groups at Queen's
    • Be sure to build in time for feedback, at various stages, from stakeholders and users.
    • If you are replacing an old site, what is your plan for redirecting users to the new site?
    • Once launched, what communication activities are required to connect your target audience to the new site?

Project scope

Define your project or content scope so you know what you are building.

  • Brainstorm requirements with all key stakeholders.

  • Review existing documentation on the web, in print/PDFs, presentation materials, etc.

  • Do an environmental scan to identify gaps and opportunities.

  • Take an inventory of your existing site. What content:
    • needs to be created?
    • should be updated?
    • can be archived or deleted?
    • should be linked to?
    • should move to this new site?
    • will integrate with external tools?

  • Note how frequently content will need to be updated.
    Do you have daily/weekly/monthly news items or regular event notices to post?
    How will you resource that?

Article – Nielsen Norman Group: Content Inventory and Audit

External requirements and managing change

Standards. Be sure you understand university and external standards and best practices, such as for:

"Feature creep." Once finalized and adopted, be aware of the tendency to keep adding to the plan. Though new ideas may be worthy of consideration, and additional requirements may be warranted, they can drive the scope of your web development plan beyond what you can effectively manage and are seldom critical to the success of your re-launch. Keep a list of these ideas to revisit at a later date.

Constant iteration. Of course, your plan will likely need some tweaking as you build out the project. Assume that some flexibility will be required but also remember that your web site is never done – it should be a constantly adapting to new communication needs, trends, tools and technology. Launch your new site with the expectation that you will continue to iterate it, guided by user feedback and analytics.