Get IT, Marketing, and Development Aligned on Website Operations

Our mission is to help our customers leverage the power of the open web to drive their business. An important part of fulfilling this mission is helping them plan for success. But most website teams today don’t set clear business and technical requirements for their website operations.

This leads to ambiguity around critical questions such as:

• Uptime: What are our hard requirements for site reliability?

• Workflow: What tools and processes do my website team require to enable them to do their jobs?

• Performance: What is our requirement for our users’ page-load speed?

• Security: How fast do we need to be able to patch our websites and infrastructure when security vulnerabilities are announced?

Each of these questions will be put to the test during the normal course of operating websites. When there is ambiguity and the test comes, wires often get crossed and expectations can be broken. This creates unnecessary friction between departments:

• “Nobody is running security updates for these sites!” —IT

• “It is so painful to deploy changes to our website with the system IT set up” —Developers

• “Why does our website seem so slow?” —Marketers

The problem isn’t talent, expertise, or the team working hard: it’s ambiguous requirements.

Website teams manage a bottomless drawer of priorities for the website. You can’t stack rank website operations work against these priorities if you aren’t clear about your requirements.

To help our customers set requirements and get alignment, we commissioned a third party DevOps expert to research website operations at external organizations and development agencies to build two tools:

• Website Operations Requirements Guide: Use this guide to set high-level business requirements for your website operations and map them to specific technical requirements. The guide outlines best-in-class technical requirements organized under the five most common business requirements among organizations with mature website operations.

• Website Operations Maturity Assessment Tool: An assessment tool that compares your current website operations to best-in-class teams in the categories of organizational culture, resourcing, performance & security, iteration & innovation, workflows & automation.

Use these two tools to set your requirements and build a roadmap for how you will meet them.

Important note: We designed these tools explicitly to be understandable and usable by IT, marketers, and website developers. The whole point of this is to be able to draw a through-line from high-level business goals to the nitty gritty of your development workflow. The sponsors of your work must be able to understand the business impact of your website operations investments in order to justify them and resource appropriately.

We are here to help.

There is a reason that 99% of website teams struggle through these questions. This is not easy. But Pantheon is in this with you and we’re here to help.

If you have any feedback on our tools, or if you would like our help and consultation using them, please reach out. We’d love to help.

The Website Operations Maturity Model Don’t let your requirements for website operations be ambiguous. Use this assessment to get IT, marketing, and your website developers aligned.