Ecommerce Website Development Project Plan: A Preparation Guide

Short answer

An ecommerce website project plan lists the phases, deliverables, owners, and dates from discovery to launch. It has six phases: discovery, requirements, architecture and design, build, QA and UAT, and launch and hypercare. Elogic Commerce agrees the plan with the client before any code is written.

Key takeaways

• McKinsey and the University of Oxford found that large IT projects run 45% over budget and 7% over time on average.
• Plan in six phases, and end each phase with a deliverable that the business signs off.
• Give every task one owner. Use a RACI table for shared work.
• Prepare the requirements document and the RFP before you hire a partner.
• Timeline drivers are scope, integrations, data quality, and decision speed.
• Elogic Commerce launched the PetHQ Shopify Plus B2B store in 2.5 months with this approach.

Ever wondered how successful projects are born? With an elaborate ecommerce website development project plan.

Project management has five phases, and project definition and planning is probably one of the most important ones. After the discovery and initiation phase is done and your website specification document is all ready, it’s time to prepare the ecommerce website scope of work and a general project roadmap for your team to follow.

At Elogic Commerce, we know that well-planned is half done, so we get very scrupulous when it comes to this second phase of project management. Having put on a planner’s hat, we develop the timeline, budget, and work breakdown structure for ecommerce websites. We even try to foresee the plans that are not in plans just yet.

Read this article on our approach to ecommerce website project planning based on real project examples that we’ve developed in the past 17 years of our operation in the market. Learn how to plan a website project that will last long into the future.

Project plans built without a team-cost foundation end up under-budgeted on the engineering line; the Adobe Commerce team cost calculator gives you defensible team-cost estimates to anchor the rest of the project plan.

Project plans only ship on time when the staffing model holds – for teams without standing internal capacity, partnering with vetted ecommerce developers for hire avoids the discovery-to-development handoff delays that compound throughout the schedule.

Why Project Planning Is Important

Tech projects are difficult to execute, especially if it comes to large-scale or heavily customized ones.

McKinsey & Company reports that, on average, large IT projects run 45% over budget and 7% over time, while delivering 56% less value than predicted. In total, such projects might face a cost overrun of $66 billion, three times more than the GDP of Malta.

Effective planning of an ecommerce website can help resolve most (if not all) of the aforementioned issues. Besides creating the essential project documentation, this phase is important for several reasons:

1. An ecommerce project plan helps you get realistic about your budget, timeline, and capabilities and stay this way throughout the project.
2. Clear goals and objectives drive your project decisions, so it’s hard to go over the project scope unless you’re about to add some relevant functionalities.
3. It’s a way to keep your finger on the pulse of the project: to see whether the tasks are completed in order and on time to come at an expected release date.
4. Planning allows you to assess risks and reduce their impact on your project.
5. In the final phase of project management, the plan serves to analyze how well you’ve achieved your goals and what else needs to be done to bring value to your business.

Ironing out the project details before you actually begin it will help you make ecommerce development – be it replatforming, integration, or any other development service – as painless as possible.

Read more: How Much Ecommerce Website Costs: Set the Right Budget for Your Project

Ecommerce project phases and deliverables

A clear plan reduces the risk of overruns. In a McKinsey and University of Oxford study of more than 5,400 IT projects, large projects delivered 56% less value than predicted.

Elogic Commerce runs these phases in Adobe Commerce development and Shopify Plus development projects.

Who does what: roles in an ecommerce project

If you lack developers, you can hire ecommerce developers from Elogic Commerce for the build phase.

Ecommerce Project Planning Explained Step by Step

Once we have the client’s brief filled in and the discovery phase finished, we start planning the project. To define scope, budget, and platform first, see ecommerce discovery and planning. The ecommerce development plan involves five steps on the way to project estimation and implementation.

We add a bonus step upon our clients’ request following PMI best practices. Read on!

Step #1: Write Down Ecommerce Website Scope of Work

A scope statement is the first general outline of the project that gives rise to the rest of the working documentation. It can be changed along the project but is initially created by a project manager and all involved stakeholders.

Ecommerce website scope of work typically consists of the following sections:

Project Purpose / Business Justification – a brief ecommerce project description and reasons for its implementation.

Objectives – a breakdown of the expected outcomes of a project. It’s important to be specific at this point, so businesses are advised to take advantage of a SMART or a CLEAR model to articulate the goals. Depending on your business focus, they will allow you to set attainable, measurable goals that will keep your project and employees right on track.

Deliverables – all the assets that a development team is committed to deliver throughout the project. This part includes all the project-related documentation to be delivered as well as services to be provided (e.g., website development from scratch, ecommerce replatforming, third-party integration, etc.).

Scope of ecommerce website project – a list of high-level units and tasks to be executed throughout the project. It’s basically a predecessor of a work breakdown structure (WBS) for an online shopping website to be completed at the next step of planning.

Project milestones – the important tasks and achievements that mark a certain stage of the project completion. They are predecessors of a project timeline and represent a clear sequence of events showing how the project advances.

Major known risks – external conditions that may adversely affect a project’s progress. The likelihood of each risk occurring and the severity of its risk should be estimated at this point.

Constraints – restrictions defining a project’s limits (e.g., budget, schedule, dependency on third-party software releases, etc.). These may also include the external dependencies – activities and tasks outside the team’s control – that may affect the project implementation.

Step #2: Organize Deliverables Into a WBS

A work breakdown structure (WBS) for an ecommerce website is a visual, hierarchical deconstruction of a project. It is built based on our clients’ requirements in three simple steps:

1. Articulate high-level deliverables (or use the ones identified in the project scope as explained in step #1).
2. Think about the tasks within each of the mentioned deliverables.
3. Get granular and split the tasks into even more detailed subtasks.

This way, a WBS breaks a large project down into smaller, chewable chunks of work to be done.

Take a look at the example of a work breakdown structure for an ecommerce website: the final deliverables stay on top of the tree diagram, while all subdivisions refer to manageable tasks to be assigned to a single person.

Why use a work breakdown structure ecommerce website? For starters, because it’s physically impossible for a single project manager to consider all the tasks to be done at the same time, especially on large projects. A WBS keeps the work organized and doesn’t let any tasks escape one’s attention.

A WBS for ecommerce websites also acts as a roadmap. It helps a team to keep up with the project deadlines and mitigate the potential risks of cost overrun and scope creep. Besides, it sets the basis for your ecommerce website architecture and defines how well you’ll be able to scale in the future.

Read more: Ecommerce Website Architecture: Why You Should Care About It

Step #3: Study the Dependencies

Now, as your ecommerce website project has been broken down into smaller pieces, you can go ahead and create an ecommerce website roadmap, a to-do list for each work package. But here’s the thing that slips the mind of many inexperienced project managers and ecommerce rookies: dependencies.

Project dependencies refer to the logical relationships between the tasks in which one task or activity depends on the completion or initiation of another.

Indeed, some tasks will be completed at the same time, while others won’t start until another ends. A project manager should recognize the order in which the tasks specified in a website development work breakdown structure should be done and write them down in a dependency log.

Studying project dependencies has a number of important implications:

• It is a way to take the responsibility off developers’ shoulders for the things they can’t control, like third-party software support or alien connectors.
• It allows the project management team to compute the impact of changes and the “what if” scenarios leading to risk assessment.
• It’s also a way to tap into the time estimates for each task and prepare for the next step of planning: setting the timeline of a project.

To plan project dependencies and to define the structure of the project components, you may need to turn to a solution architect. Read more on this ecommerce role and learn how a Magento solution architect will strengthen your development team.

Read more: The Importance of Magento Solution Architect to Design Your Ecommerce Store

Step #4: Set a Project Timeline

Once your project deliverables have been mapped out and dependencies established, you can set your project timeline. At Elogic Commerce, we build and present a project timeline using a Gantt chart.

A Gantt chart for ecommerce websites puts the dependencies and resources identified in the previous steps of the planning journey in a single bar chart. It presents a visually clear view of the time you allocated to each task as well as their dependencies.

The vertical axis of the chart stands for the tasks to be completed, whereas the horizontal axis is for the time allocated. The chart also shows the start and finish date of the project, the duration of each task, and the way in which tasks group together, overlap, and link with one another.

At Elogic Commerce, we also further subdivide the tasks into periods called sprints that end with each achieved milestone. This way, you always stay in the know of your project development and obtain tangible results that you can act on (e.g., adjust the requirement and see how your future ecommerce website will actually work).

Most ecommerce website roadmaps are created in Excel or using project scheduling software (TeamGantt is our personal favorite at Elogic Commerce). In fact, the latter has become so popular for its shareable and collaborative features, like real-time comments, task updates, and task assignments to a team member, among others.

Whatever approach to creating a timeline you choose, remember to stay specific and don’t be afraid to customize it as per your project requirements!

Step #5: Allocate the Budget

The last issue to resolve before your project goes into the implementation phase is the budget. At Elogic Commerce, we understand the value of your money and prepare two budget estimation documents based on a work breakdown structure for an ecommerce website and a timeline.

First, we specify the cost of each increment in a WBS. All the tasks are written out in a spreadsheet along with the time allocated to complete them and the cost per task. In this raw estimate, we also indicate the hidden costs of module development and after-launch support. Non-essential tasks are also marked so that you can adjust the budget by adding or eliminating the requirements.

*Costs are indicated for illustrative purposes only and can vary from the actual hourly rate.

Second, we prepare the calendar of payments as per the project timeline. Following the Agile project implementation model, we organize all tasks into sprints at the end of which you will get an ecommerce website project report with the completed milestones and results. As such, you pay for what you receive within a set period of time.

*Costs are indicated for illustrative purposes only and do not offer precise estimates of a project.

Creating two types of estimate documents gives you a clear picture of the costs involved in project implementation as well as lets you twist and tweak the tasks and timeframes to adjust the budget.

Bonus: a full PMI project plan for Elogic Commerce clients

Good news for those who choose Elogic Commerce! Upon our clients’ request, we formed a full-fledged project plan for an ecommerce website following PMI best practices.

Here are the practices we follow to ensure the project planning phase ends in a tip-top manner:

1. Map out the project life cycle and key milestones as well as communicate our way of work to the project stakeholders (consider this guide a demo version of how Elogic Commerce approaches project planning in real life!).
2. Discuss customer requirements and set a project scope to make sure that we stay on the same page with our client.
3. Define the organization, systems, and the roles and responsibilities for a project manager, functional managers, and team members.
4. Conduct quality assurance checks, observe all results achieved during the phase, and look for ways to improve.
5. Plan your commitments, including the project at large, schedules, human resources, and budget.
6. Track and analyze variances to avoid timeline slips and unresolved issues as well as measure project performance.
7. Take corrective measures to address the detected variances and put the project back on track.
8. Exercise an effective escalation procedure to ensure problems are resolved before they can affect the project progress.
9. Put in place a formal process for change management.

By the end of the project planning phase, our client receives a detailed, transparent ecommerce website development project plan specifying what, when, and how our work will be delivered.

Documents to prepare before you hire a partner

1. A requirements list with functional and non-functional requirements.
2. A requirements document with scope and acceptance criteria.
3. A B2B ecommerce RFP to compare vendors on the same terms.
4. A launch checklist to plan go-live from day one.
5. A Magento consulting session to test the plan against your platform and integrations.

Project plan vs scope vs roadmap

Terminology can be confusing. And before you get down to the planning process, it’s important to distinguish between three absolutely different project documents: project plan, project scope, and project roadmap.

Ecommerce website development project plan includes all working documentation required to complete a project. Divided into sections, it lists the stakeholders’ roles and names, the schedule and duration of the project, the budget allocated for each step, project risks and assumptions, change request management, and more. It basically encompasses all the other documents established for the project and should be your reference point during the execution stage.

Ecommerce website scope of work defines the project purpose, deliverables, and major known risks and constraints. It lays out the basic information to start an ecommerce business and is less detailed than a project plan. Project scope may be a stand-alone document to start the planning phase or form a part of a project charter filled and signed at the initiation phase of project management.

Ecommerce website roadmap provides a strategic overview of the project execution, with its major milestones and the time for realization. It is usually structured as a diagram and keeps a merchant informed on the project’s progress.

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Start with a plan that holds

Elogic Commerce turns your goals and requirements into a phased plan with owners and dates.

Elogic Commerce maps your scope, platform, integrations, and phases before the build starts.

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Sources

• McKinsey: Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value
• Brainhub: Fixed-price contracts
• PM World Library: Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value