Managing the Life Cycle of Your Extranet

Putting Together an Extranet Control Board

To make the virtual team development process more effective, it is very important to put together an Extranet Control Board (ECB). It is a common practice to run Change Control Boards within software development departments, and the same concept is useful for managing your extranet. Make sure to try to enlist top-level delegates from a number of departments and partners so that you can achieve buy-in and sustained support throughout the life of the extranet.

One of your main tasks is to develop a set of clearly defined roles and responsibilities for all parties involved with your extranet, so that you know how they will interact with each other and within the parameters of your design documentation. Also, the ECB is a forum in which to develop extranet policies and procedures, define style guides, and so on. One member of the ECB may perform one or more of these roles in an extranet project.

Here are some suggested roles and responsibilities:

Extranet Board Member

The Extranet Control Board is comprised of members who are responsible for all the decisions regarding major additions, deletions, or other changes to the extranet's content. A major change would be one that substantially alters the functionality, intent, or implementation of the extranet. These decisions are based on requirements documents, design documents, and other strategic plans.

Webmaster/Team Leader

A large or far-flung extranet may have multiple Webmasters or team leaders. They are responsible for prioritizing and assigning work to the developers based on projects approved by the Extranet Board.

Developer

Analysts, designers, database administrators, language translators, writers, programmers, and other people who have a direct role in the design and implementation of the extranet fall into this category.

Quality Assurance (QA) Manager

The QA Manager, a crucial member of the ECB, has the responsibility of determining whether the requirements specified in the design documentation can be demonstrated in the components of the extranet.

Tester/Reviewer

These members of the ECB include those who have enough knowledge of your extranet's components and applications to be able to give useful feedback as to their functionality and performance. Often selected customers or third parties perform this function as participants in a beta test program.

Product Manager

The Product Manager ensures that the particular content area or application on the extranet fulfills the needs of the target audience. For example, you may have one manager dedicated to implementing electronic commerce for your extranet, and therefore they would conduct market and competitive research, poll prospective users, and then develop application content criteria based on the findings.

With a well-run ECB, you will gain senior-level support across all of the organizations, achieve early buy-in and involvement by the different business entities and help establish a level of ownership that will sustain the project.

Managing the Information Flow

The Extranet Control Board (ECB) should be directly involved in the development process. For example, the ECB might be involved in the assignment and resolution of defects - "defects" in this case meaning all types of change requests.

Web Version Control/Configuration Management Products