Questions and Answers

This is actually the first book on e-commerce project management. So far there was not a book to describe the specific dependencies and guidance in the realm of e-commerce project management.

That there are ground principles for managing e-commerce projects; they are not rocket science and once you are aware of and apply them you will clear your way toward successful e-commerce project management – of course now you need to walk it.

Definitely not, but it contains all that are necessary in order to manage successfully e-commerce projects and achieve e-commerce project targets.

Violating any of the Laws will create a project management debt and the later you find out about it the higher the interest will be and the harder to cope with the problem.

The whole book is based on real-life experience in some of the biggest and most complex e-commerce projects. The Laws are derived based on a summary of what works and what does not in e-commerce project management throughout the author’s entire experience as an e-PM.

E-commerce projects are more dynamic, evolving and require much more various specialized experience than the general IT projects. In e-commerce projects there are new software platforms coming almost every year, new extensions for all the platforms are coming almost weekly and updates almost daily. Much of the projects require intergation of various 3rd party software, like ERP, CMS, CRM, carriers, image galeries, payment providers, etc. For international projects, the providers differ from country to country, like carrier and payment providers – therefore involving multiple integration. A lot of the software platforms have an open source version, which speeds even more the dynamics and produces even more extensions that will not be supported in the long-term. Because of the whole dynamic, many of the 3rd party software providers have a challenge to keep their services trouble-free, which in turn puts extra load on the e-commerce solution implementation. Additionally, there is a lack of proper documentation for much of the open source e-commerce software. All this dynamic and evolution distinguishes e-commerce projects from other IT projects.

Yes, most are, but as Prof. Ruskov, chair of FMI Sofia University and long-year international IT project manager said, this “book is different”! The Laws of E-commerce Project Management book is very dynamic, boiled down to the point and based on real life experience. This makes it extremely effective, because a) people will really, actually read it (it is tinny little book, compared to the big 300-pages textbook bricks); b) spread it among all stakeholders which will also read it and thus all be on the same page; take it with them and review it before, during and after the project; c) apply practically the information as there are step by step examples, auxiliaries and templates to directly use in the real world.

Practically NO! Each piece of the book and the auxiliaries comes from direct professional experience in various multinational projects, several of them rank among the biggest and most complex e-commerce projects like those for THE NORTH FACE, KIPLING, EASTPAK and others. The principles can be very good used for general project management practices, but there are not any general management practices that will explain how to successfully apply them to e-commerce projects.