Portal Project success step 10

The portal connects individuals, information, and applications to help enterprises provide online support for business projects and customers. Next, let's take a look at how to plan and correctly execute the portal project.

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As the Internet is increasingly used to connect individuals, information and applications, companies are competing to provide support for business projects and customers online. However, many companies have integrated multiple sites, extended networks, internal internet, and self-service programs, the infrastructure used to provide Support Services is also developed in a decentralized manner using a series of related technologies.

In this case, companies have to pay a high cost to maintain the operation of various facilities and services, and it is increasingly difficult to meet the increasing service needs of customers. Therefore, these service methods cannot meet the needs of employees, partners, customers, or suppliers. They face risks for the company's faithfulness, productivity, and income.

To solve the above problems, the portal has become more and more popular among companies. If the portal project can be well planned and executed, it can provide a unique path for a variety of different information and applications. However, many portal projects have failed in the application implementation phase, or they will soon stop.

Portal projects are complex, but the causes of these project failures (or successes) are essentially the same. Do you want to know the conditions for the successful plan portal project? Let's take a look at the ten specific steps outlined below.

1. Determine the target

To execute a portal project, you must first determine whether to create an enterprise intranet portal, an open public portal, or a private Internet portal? Is the planned portal project a part of a larger project that combines multiple sites and/or applications, or for other reasons? The answer to these questions will guide you through the architecture of the project, the technology applied by the project, and the selection of the project design.

Next, you need to clarify the business goals you want to achieve through the Application Implementation of the portal project. In general, these goals include:

Reduce operation costs

Improve productivity

Improved decision-making mechanism

Strengthen business relationships

Improve business processes

Improve Customer Satisfaction

2. Define business needs

Before you start planning a portal project, you must clarify the company's business needs. If you do not have a clear understanding of the company's business needs and criteria for project success, the project may fail, and the project may fail before the project is planned.

Usually, the judgment on the company's business needs will ultimately affect and determine whether the portal project is successful. Internal portal projects focus on improving operational efficiency, while external portal projects focus on increasing the company's market share, company revenue, and stable customer base.

Next, we need to estimate the project cost. Before selecting a platform, you must first understand the user's needs, various comprehensive options, and the security measures to be taken. The costs required for project application implementation should be fully considered, including license, training, design, development, test, and repair costs. Once the platform and specific application plan to be selected are determined, the project cost must be evaluated twice, because the investment demand evaluation in this case will be more accurate.

Finally, after clarifying the business needs, we should consider re-evaluating the portal project plan. Ask yourself: do we need such a portal? What is the potential return on investment?

3. Develop step-by-step application plans

Since portal projects usually involve a series of applications, these projects are often highly complex and integrate with a variety of advanced security features. Do not expect to integrate all the functions in the first application of the portal. On the contrary, a specific step-by-step application plan should be developed to focus on meeting the primary business needs first so as to ensure the initial success of the Plan. After completing all the important functional items, add the advanced functions.

4. Create a management structure

As portal projects involve a variety of different applications and user experience from different scattered business departments, management issues may occur within the company during project application implementation. The transparency of company decisions is crucial. For example, if the customer relationship department has the right to manage the customer relationship management procedures while the human resources department has the right to manage the internal Internet of the enterprise, what should be the specific decision-making process?

Create corresponding management structures to ensure that various resources are in place in time and provide support for portal projects. If you cannot get top-down support from the company, there will always be risks in portal projects.

5. Investment in training

If a company chooses a commercial portal product, it should be aware that the application of new portal facilities will bring changes to the company. To make the functions of the new platform play a role effectively, employees of the company must fully understand the work and application principles of the new portal platform. Therefore, once a platform is selected, it is necessary to put training questions on the agenda and make a good time plan.

To better understand the new portal technology, companies should consider verifying the new technology. Such verification can be performed in areas with high risks, or in areas of design and user experience. This step should be implemented as early as possible because it not only helps to verify the technical performance of the portal, but also helps the company's shareholders to determine and predict the prospects of the project application.

Finally, a series of specific standards should be set for the future technical application and user experience of the project to lay the foundation for further application implementation in the future.

6. create infrastructure

The delay in infrastructure creation often prevents the smooth development of the entire project. The establishment of infrastructure is a complex process, which usually involves the company's network system, content management, database connection, application communication and security facilities. Therefore, it is necessary to plan the portal development and operation environment as soon as possible, and manage the portal through clearly differentiated steps.

7. Design User Experience

No matter how complicated the work of multiple applications combined by portals is, it is invisible to end users. Before entering the design stage of the project, you must first find out the answers to the following questions:

Which users do you want to apply new portals?

What are the main tasks you want to perform?

What is the impact of portals on the company's productivity?

Is the portal project goal consistent with the project cost?

The answer to these questions is undoubtedly very important. To ensure a good portal application experience, you can use common tools, including usability testing, role analysis, user survey, task analysis, card creation and classification.

8. clarify the content management framework

The goal of a portal project is to achieve a comprehensive and seamless front-end. Therefore, the management of Portal content is usually conducted by multiple scattered business departments, different departments have different development and workflow requirements.

For many original applications, a simple content change will have an astonishing impact on the time required for task completion. This is in direct conflict with one of the criteria for determining the success of the Portal Project-providing information and services in a timely manner.

The content management system can help companies solve this problem, give business departments greater control, and allow non-technical users to manage content using familiar desktop tools.

Since the portal infrastructure requires consistent and clearly classified content to provide users with the relevant information they need, many Portal products have applied content management technology. The ideal situation is to provide services for a variety of different system needs through a single platform. In view of this, content management should involve the entire company to meet the various content requirements of portal applications.

9. Clarify security requirements

Application Implementation of portal projects requires the support of multiple security services, such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Because the portal project involves a variety of applications, a single signature is very important to ensure the user's successful application experience, because it can ensure the security of the portal application through a single authentication method. The following questions must be answered:

Must a company portal be connected to sensitive external applications?

Does the company have a security framework?

Can portals be accessed from multiple devices in different locations? Do these different access methods have different security requirements?

Do portal projects need to provide services to external partners with different security policies?

The answer to these questions will determine whether the portal platform can provide necessary infrastructure support to meet the company's security needs.

10. Investment for testing

The application implementation of the portal project can combine the functions of different applications. Improper management may lead to unexpected complex problems, such as competing for system resources. Therefore, project tests should be planned and put into practice as soon as possible.

With the increasing technological advances, the functions of Portal products have been greatly improved and improved. For various companies, portal projects have become a good commercial investment. However, companies should fully understand the complex factors behind the technical factors when evaluating portal projects. Since portal technology is usually combined with a variety of different services and content, the application implementation of portal projects usually involves the needs and interests of different shareholders across different departments in the company. The success or failure of the portal project depends on whether the project plan is appropriate and whether the implementation is reasonable. The ten steps mentioned above may be helpful to you and your company.