E-commerce Website Project: Project Selection and Initiation

This report delves into the intricacies of an e-commerce website project, emphasizing the critical aspects of project management. It begins by highlighting the significant growth and potential of the online retail market, underscoring the importance of a well-defined strategy for success. The report explores the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) framework, detailing its five key stages: project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control, and closure. It emphasizes the importance of feasibility studies, business case documents, and comprehensive planning to ensure projects stay on track and within budget. The report also addresses the need for effective project execution, monitoring, and control to manage scope creep, track performance indicators, and ensure timely delivery. Furthermore, the report touches upon the use of agile methodologies and the importance of identifying competitors, analyzing social media activities, and understanding market pricing. The report concludes by stressing the significance of stakeholder training, risk recognition, and the alignment of the project plan with the company's strategic goals, providing a comprehensive overview of the essential elements for successfully managing an e-commerce website project.

Running head: E-COMMERCE WEBSITE PROJECT
E-COMMERCE WEBSITE PROJECT
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

E-COMMERCE WEBSITE PROJECT 1
The online based retailing is a prospective and enormous market. Within the year
2021, the value of online retailing market is going to reach 4.5 trillion dollars. For making
more profit, the offline retailers are investing in the development in e-commerce. Without the
exact knowledge about ecommerce processes, this is very much easy to fail before launching
the website.
The development of an ecommerce website is consisting of many of the small
procedures like business analysis, UI development, choosing e-commerce related platform.
This is very much difficult for the online retailer for keeping the things under control
(Laudon & Traver, 2016). For not failing in the schedule and for avoiding the overrun of the
budget, there should be a clear strategy to manage the project.
If the owner of the online store have not any plan or the owners does not manage the
development procedure properly, then it is pretty sure that he may run into some problems.
Many of the online retailers focus mostly on the business plan of them to create an e-
commerce website (Imran et al., 2018). For making an e-commerce website, they may be
unknown to the market situation and also to the market competition. These kind of attitude
can result in lack of vision for the development in future for the e-commerce website.
Project Management Body of Knowledge also known as PMBOK is not a
methodology. It is the framework of guidelines, best practices, processes, standards,
terminologies and conventions, which are accepted as the standards of project management
industry. The framework of PMBOK from PMI is defined as the traditional methodology of
project management (Drob & Zichil, 2013). The most important thing for an e-commerce
related project is to maintain the building time. The developer should not add any of the
functionalities or feature to the project after starting as it is very much crucial for the business
that the developer have to change the specification of the project several times during the

2E-COMMERCE WEBSITE PROJECT
building time. PMBOK methodology in the creation of the website of e-commerce refers to
five stages of the project management of the website of e-commerce. These stages contain
multiple techniques and processes of the project management of E-commerce website by
which for completing or evaluating the way of running the methodology or the project of use.
Project Initiation: In the project life cycle, project initiation is the initial stage. At this point,
the project's viability and quality are evaluated (Burke, 2013). The project managers have
used the evaluation methods to determine whether or not to undertake a venture.
Feasibility Study: It is the analysis of the project's cost, objectives and timelines to assess the
project's execution in the life cycle. This balances the project’s requirements with the
available resources for seeing if pursuing e-commerce website project makes sense or not.
Business case Document: The document of the project justifies the requirement of the
project and this includes the estimation of the sustainable financial benefits.
Project Planning: After receiving the green light, the project of E-commerce, needs the solid
plan in order to guide the team and should keep them on budget and time. The well planned
project provides the guidance to achieve the resources, procure the required materials and
obtain the financing (Fleming & Koppelman, 2016). This is also very much crucial to identify
the competitors who are already available in the market. The developers have to identify the
competitors, the keywords that are used by them, the cost as well as they have to learn as
much as possible about the business. The plan of the project provides the direction to the
team to handle risks, communicate to the stakeholders about the benefits, create acceptance,
manage suppliers and produce quality outputs. Planning of the project for the e-commerce
website prepares the team to handle the obstacle, which the project team can encounter in the
project life cycle and helps the team in understanding the timeframe, scope and cost.

3E-COMMERCE WEBSITE PROJECT
Project Execution: This stage is connected with the project management of the website of E-
commerce website. Execution in the project builds the deliverables, which satisfy the clients.
The team leaders distribute the manpower to maintain the team members centered on the
tasks assigned.
Project Monitoring and Control: Monitoring and control of the e-commerce project are
combined with the project execution as they occur together (Heagney, 2016). The team
executes the plan of the project and the team should monitor all the aspect and project’s
progress. To ensure the project's production, the team needs to monitor the tasks for
preventing the creep of the scope, track the variation from the allocated time and cost and
calculate the performance indicators.
Project Closure: The team of the project closes the project while they deliver the complete
project to the clients by communicating to the stakeholders about the completion and
releasing the resources of the other project (Young, 2016). This stage is very important stage
in the e-commerce project life cycle, which allows the team for evaluating and documenting
the project utilizing the success and mistakes of the previous project for establishing the
successful teams and stronger process.
For getting success to the e-commerce website project, the project management
methodology is the first step to be considered. The best approach to manage the project is to
enable the team to make implement effectively and efficiently at the time of reducing risk.
For most of the projects, the agile methodology allow the developers to work as the unit that
is cross functional (Cai et al., 2017). The most important thing for an e-commerce related
project is to maintain the building time. The developer should not add any of the
functionalities or feature to the project after starting as it is very much crucial for the business
that the developer have to change the specification of the project several times during the

4E-COMMERCE WEBSITE PROJECT
building time. There should be a project manager on the team of consultant for the
management of scope creep. The manager of the project should help in reviewing the desired
changes as well as he will need to with the timeline and revise that.
It is decided by most of the companies that they have to make utilize of the
consultants. The staffs can be used for specific or small pieces of the site. This is also very
much crucial to identify the competitors who are already available in the market. The
developers have to identify the competitors, the keywords that are used by them, the cost as
well as they have to learn as much as possible about the business (Malić, Makitan & Petrov,
2016). This step of project management is so much complex as this includes the research that
what is the exact price the competitors are offering. After that the developers have to decide
the price that they will offer.
The social media is one more segment which is to be included in the e-commerce
project. The developers have to look at the social media activities of other competitors such
as Facebook, Google, or twitter. After researching in this matter they will get the idea of
developing the strategy of social media.
The e-commerce project is one of the challenging most project among all type of
software projects. With the help of inter organisational and integrated nature the ecommerce
relate projects are having a faster development cycle time. However, a successful
implementation of the ecommerce related project is having dependency on the way of
implementation handling of the organisations (Malić, Makitan & Petrov, 2016). The
ecommerce related projects are tending to have continuous changes as well as the only way
for managing the un-interrupted changes, the users have to try to incorporate with more
functionalities. All of the functional related alterations have to be grouped together as well as
introduced in the future release.

5E-COMMERCE WEBSITE PROJECT
Most the users who use the ecommerce website, are having a well defined model of
business in the place. The phase of inception of the project is spent always to guide the users
to discover the requirements. The ecommerce related project management need to be aware
of the primary issues scalability, response time at various loads, and responsiveness that are
very much critical for the rate of success. The project is also having the involvement of
components that are custom developed. This is also very much important that all of the
criteria that are related to the performance have been met.
With the existence of ecommerce, the boom of ecommerce and internet and the
pressure of companies and govt are to come up with a good website. The stakeholders and the
project team members need to give hands on experience of training about all of the above
factors. The consumer or the users have to be profiled and identified properly. The project
plan of ecommerce related website should be supportive and aligned about the strategic plan
of the company. The recognition of the risks of ecommerce related project have to be made
by all of the stakeholders who are related to the project. The possibilities of the failure can be
sited as well as it should be defined that how the risks can be mitigated.
The Gantt chart is given below:
ID Task
Mode
Task Name Duration Start Finish
0 e-commerce project 38 days Mon 12/16/19 Wed 2/5/20
1 Requirement analysis 8 days Mon 12/16/19 Wed 12/25/19
2 Technical analysis 3 days Mon 12/16/19 Wed 12/18/19
3 Operational analysis 3 days Thu 12/19/19 Mon 12/23/19
4 Risk analysis 2 days Tue 12/24/19 Wed 12/25/19
5 Web design 16 days Thu 12/26/19 Thu 1/16/20
6 Layout 3 days Thu 12/26/19 Mon 12/30/19
7 Design of database 3 days Tue 12/31/19 Thu 1/2/20
8 Design of website 7 days Fri 1/3/20 Mon 1/13/20
9 Future design 3 days Tue 1/14/20 Thu 1/16/20
10 Development 7 days Fri 1/17/20 Mon 1/27/20
11 Development of payment gateway 2 days Fri 1/17/20 Mon 1/20/20
12 Development of database 1 day Tue 1/21/20 Tue 1/21/20
13 Category and product listing 3 days Wed 1/22/20 Fri 1/24/20
14 Testing and Implement 8 days Mon 1/27/20 Wed 2/5/20
15 Purchase of domain name and hosting server2 days Mon 1/27/20 Tue 1/28/20
16 Deploy website 3 days Wed 1/29/20 Fri 1/31/20
17 Test website 3 days Mon 2/3/20 Wed 2/5/20
W T F S S M T W T
Dec 8, '19 Dec 29, '19 Jan 19, '20 Feb 9, '20

6E-COMMERCE WEBSITE PROJECT
References:
Burke, R. (2013). Project management: planning and control techniques. New Jersey,
USA, 26.
Cai, L., He, X., Dai, Y., & Zhu, K. (2018, September). Research on B2B2C E-commerce
Website Design Based on User Experience. In Journal of Physics: Conference Series (Vol.
1087, No. 6, p. 062043). IOP Publishing.
Drob, C., & Zichil, V. (2013). Overview regarding the main guidelines, standards and
methodologies used in project management. Journal of Engineering Studies and
Research, 19(3), 26.
Fleming, Q. W., & Koppelman, J. M. (2016, December). Earned value project management.
Project Management Institute.
Heagney, J. (2016). Fundamentals of project management. Amacom.
Imran, M., Haque, I., Rahman, M., & Asfat, K. (2018). E-commerce System (MIK Online
Shop) (Doctoral dissertation).
Laudon, K. C., & Traver, C. G. (2016). E-commerce: business, technology, society.
Malić, M., Makitan, V., & Petrov, I. (2016). Change control in project of web application
development in e-commerce environment. ON APPLIED INTERNET AND INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGIES, 344.
Travis, D. (2017). E-commerce usability: tools and techniques to perfect the on-line
experience. CRC Press.
Young, T. L. (2016). Successful project management. Kogan Page Publishers.