What risks are involved to website development?

What risks are involved to website development?

First of all, let me explain that why am i writing on this topic?
In fact i used to see many software development houses started and then finally either changed their names or left the industry because of uncertain and unexpected situations in software development phase. The bottom line is, every new project gives a birth to a development house and every bad experience ends with a “Server not found” Error 🙁

Anyways, i will discuss all the related aspects which are involved in these unpleasant circumstances. Either those are over excitements or over estimations.

Lets start with a risk management philosophy: Indiana Jones school of risk management 🙂
Never worrying about problems until they happened, and then reacting in some heroic way.

I love this philosophy too because we, the PHP Developers, mostly faced such situations where you are not allowed to go for proactive risk management philosophy but reactive risk management philosophy. Few mates blamed to those businessmen who entered in IT industry to earn profits, they don’t like delays, discussions and feasibility. No doubt, every-time the expectations go higher and somehow due to rule of marginal probability the performance decline and morale of the team too. Clients do not like to pay much for a short time development time as well. Emergency cases are exceptional where the team of 10 developers concentrate on a serious cause project. But when to win a bid, few routine development groups or companies go for a sprint so finally they lost their stamina and destroy the gait of industry. As i experienced, Indiana Jones style is more suitable for fiction and has a rare chance of success in real life situations. But still PHP Development world is experiencing this widely. Normally in software engineering a risk has two characteristics, first one is uncertainty and the second one is loss. In website development, these two characteristics are changed to certain uncertainty and confirm loss whenever you are going to win or snatch a client. As we studied that Project Manager tries to find answers of those questions which are linked to risks as follows:

• What can not be according to expectations?
• What is the probability of getting out of track?
• What can be the degree of losses in technical/non-technical activities graph?
• What would he be able to do in such unpleasant situation?

But in website development, development manager and project manager both and sometimes whole team know the answers of these questions with the suitable reasons as follows:

Q: What can not be according to expectations?
A: Output, the Project.

Q: What is the probability of getting out of track?
A: Starting from off-road because Client don’t know the track as well.

Q: What can be the degree of losses in technical/non-technical activities graph?
A: Project will might be delivered as premature version and further development will be stopped because client was not sure that how will this project justify in market?

Q: What would he be able to do in such unpleasant situation?
A: We will simply start another project with same passion, although last project didn’t gone well but now few of us are senior developers and on of us is now a new project manager 🙂

What i perceived till yet is the problem of inspiration. Another common practice is to under estimate the competitors and over estimate ourselves. Whenever a new project starts, we take inspiration from giants who worked for years and got reputations e.g. facebook, twitter, getafreelancer.com etc. And we must clap for those guys who willingly accept the challenge to develop such great websites within dreamy dates. I will not mention the figure of project deadlines in days but its hilarious. Salute to those development teams who are still following the reactive risk management philosophy else that philosophy is suitable for fiction not for the reality and specially where repute of an organization matters a lot. Another misconception is that, a dot com represents an organization. New comers should understand that when dot coms were not in much usage, still big names were existing in industry. So don’t go for about us, policy, terms and usage pages whenever planning a cyber venture. Be clear about your vision, if a service so what are you planning to serve?

As seniors suggested that we should go for proactive risk management so we should properly plan a project either its short term or long term. If ever you have a free time and want to utilize it so must go for rough work, discussions, visions, clarity of objectives and paper work. Then go for implementation, not overnight ideas and another dot com with coming soon pages which remain indexed with Google.

I hope that this article will help those who think that PHP Website Development is apart from other Website Development styles. They should only add an exception that it depends upon the nature of project, PHP does not mean that kick start PHP. Every successful project demands concentration, feasibility planning and proactive risk management philosophy implementation.

Cheers 🙂