The Role of the Manager

An effective collaborative development environment will never be accomplished without a single individual in charge of the process with whom the "buck stops." The project needs one person whose job is to watch the entire project from above and ensure that the task at hand is being met a manager. Although it is the nature of Web designers to want to work in an atmosphere of teamwork, someone still needs to be in charge. Choosing the right manager is at least as important as choosing the technology with which you will implement the project.

Once the technology decisions have been made, the more important issues of working with the people who will be helping you develop your Web project need to be examined. More than anything else, your team will need a manager who understands both the technology and the people he will be working with.

The Manager position has been called by other names that include, but are not limited to, Webmaster, Web mistress, Web architect, Web facilitator, project lead, program lead, and boss. What's important in collaborative design is that a single individual has a final say in the development process. The proper name for that individual is unimportant. For the rest of this text, we will refer to the position as "the manager."

The job of the manager is a difficult and complex one. The first role is responsibility for the growth of the site. Equally important is the role of assessing the site during the development process to bring the project back on course should it sway. This requires a firm understanding of the development process, the tools provided by FrontPage 2003, and how those tools interact with FrontPage 2003. We'll cover that issue in this chapter and the next.

Typically, the duties of the manager are best performed by a single individual. Even though a large project can have many people in a leadership position, a single leader who heads the project still best suits a collaborative effort.