I was just reading chapter one of Jessica Burdman’s “Collaborative Web Development: Strategies and Best Practices for Web Teams” and it brought back some great memories of all the project management I had done when I worked in Boston.

The thing I loved most about project management was that I would be working on different projects coming from different departments. Each project required a working knowledge of what the members of each team did independently while also knowing how what each team did affected the other teams. I got to know and understand how the entire business worked from the bottom up - it was exciting and fulfilling.

One specific item in chapter one of Burdman - when she writes about how new/Beta technologies are often used in web projects - is interesting and so true. I dealt with so many end user customers that instantly wanted new and expansive functionality in their websites. However, when we were ready to release an update I would only push it out to a few of our midsize customers at first. This built loyalty with some of our newer/smaller customers because they felt important we chose them to get the release before everyone else. My rationale was that it was better for a few midsize customers to find the minor programming bugs than it was to endager business with our larger customers. After all, the larger the business, the more the bugs would affect them.