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Summary: Web development's central challenge: not speed but diversity
Review: (Reviewer's note: since this review was first written, Ashley Friedlein's "Web Project Management" has arrived on the market. It outshines "Collaborative Web Development" in almost every way.)As new dot.coms joing the late-2000 not.coms, it's becoming more and more obvious that parts of the Web development industry are remarkably badly run. The stories of mismanagement at Boo.com were just the start. After ditching a quarter of its staff, Iam.com has sued its Web development firm, Razorfish, for producing an unusable site. Ex-employees of Digital Entertainment Network are swapping tales about the weirdness of trying to get anything done there. Web sites need to be managed, and the evidence suggests the task is harder than it appears. Why so tough? Analysts often claim that the defining characteristic of Web project management is speed - that famous "Internet time" we heard so much about before the April 2000 tech-wreck. But Jessica Burdman doubts that time is the essence of the Web development challenge. She notes the often similarly aggressive schedules in fields like software creation. (She could just as easily cite television and print production guidelines.) Burdman's book suggests instead that the central challenge of Web development is the sheer breadth of the Web development task. That task encompasses everything from application programming to direct marketing copywriting to Internet security to video production. The people who perform these tasks will arrive with different backgrounds, different expectations, different requirements for a work environment. Burdman expands on 20 different types of core, extended and special team members. One site manager comments to her that development managers "become more like an orchestra conductor than a project manager". In smaller projects - typical of the environment in Australia, from where I'm writing - team members must often play multiple roles. That elevates the demands both on the assembler of the team, and on the team members themselves. The diverse nature of the Web team also poses a substantial communications challenge. In a family, notes Burdman, everyone can communicate almost intuitively. The same holds for families of designers, programmers or sales professionals. Assemble people from these different families for a project, and the non-verbal, implied communication must be reconstructed. But the broad nature of the Web team brings rewards as well. In a world of narrow specialisation, Web development provides a rare haven for the talented generalist who can think in structures and processes. And if your project involves high-level coding, your development team will contain a rich pool of structured intelligences - good programmers, who can bring rich insights to a project. Burdman quotes one technology director as saying that "(software) engineers must participate in every step of the process ... They're smart people and if you have them all in the room, great things can happen." If you're new to Web project management, then Burdman provides an informal checklist for managing Web projects. Her book whisks you across the little-mapped territory of Web project management in just over 200 pages. And it concentrates on the team-intensive aspects of the task, which necessarily occur later in the development cycle. Burdman spent time as a technical writer before she "stumbled into Web project management". Perhaps as a result, her book suffers a little from the classic shortcoming of the technical writer's product: overview without authority. A better book might not only list the challenges, but draw attention to the challenges that matter most. A better book might draw less on the author's small group of sometimes disorganised-sounding friends. A better book might embrace more fully the rigor of established fields like software development, where effective methodologies such as use cases have grown up over time. A better book might avoid telling slips, such as calling "requirements" a layman's term for "specifications". A better book might even include higher-quality documentation templates than the lightweight efforts on this volume's obligatory CD. But if you're wondering why Web development management seems so tough, there are worse places to start.
Rating: 
Summary: Essential to a Web project manager or their manager
Review: 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.
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Summary: Essential reading for web teams
Review: Excellent, I found this book a wonderful bridge to get me from the advertising and graphic design nich. It was right on target and got me up to speed when I was hired into a team for the development of high paced website presentations. It really helped me focus our team efforts when going after a new client. The cd was a quick and effective tool that was extremely useful! Thanks for the critical tools I needed to get the job done <i>fast.
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Summary: Most of the Way there, but....
Review: 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!
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Summary: Great Project Template
Review: 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.
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Summary: Excellent for all Web Project Managers
Review: I am a senior Web project manager and I am also doing my master degree in Web project management. This book is by far better than the others. The author follow a good methodology and give helpful and easy examples, she's very grounded. Recommended for junior as well as senior PM. (sorry for my poor English, I speak French!).
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Summary: Good, but basic...
Review: I bought this book hoping it would give me some insights that I hadn't gotten in several years of managing a Web development team in an agency setting. While it was somewhat informative, it did fall prey to the common problem on focusing more on technique than on theory. I expect a LOT more on process and best practices... It's a good primer if you're trying to break into the industry and need to know an overview, but people with experience won't find this book a great help.
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Summary: Worthless
Review: 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.
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Summary: Great Introduction to how Web teams work
Review: I give a copy of this book to new hires at my company (a small NYC Web marketing and development firm) who are entry level or do not have past experience working as part of a diversified Web development team. This book is probably not totally "eye-opening" to those who have worked at any of the well established Web agencies/development companies (like me), but it's still useful to compare notes on your own production process and best practices versus that described in Burdman's book (basically Red Sky Interactive's process). And the CD with sample forms is interesting and may inspire some processes you might want to try. The only way this book could be a bit better is if it had more "what to do when X happens". There are standard process errors and client demands/misunderstandings that result in various process issues that could be addressed in this book more thoroughly.
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Summary: Good resource for project managers new to the web
Review: 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.
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