Move Your Mission Forward with WebOps

Under-resourced web teams forced to mend legacy technology with limited tools are often frustrated because of the numerous low-impact, yet time-consuming tasks that bog down productivity. If your IT team is overwhelmed, it will impact their ability to succeed with their mission and ultimately, this will affect your entire organization.

As COVID increased our dependency on online systems, it also exposed the risk of underinvesting in digital infrastructure, and those pressures aren't going away anytime soon. If you want to focus on impacting your organization's mission, your team must execute essential web functions first.

John Richards, Head of Developer Advocacy here at Pantheon, and Chaney Kourouniotis, Senior Solutions Consultant at Strategic Partner and Digital Agency FFW, recently collaborated on a joint presentation about how WebOps best practices can set web teams up for success.

"When we talk about WebOps, we're not talking about a single person, department, or even a product. WebOps is simply a set of practices and strategies that enable you to run your web infrastructure in a way that makes it work for you and not the other way around." 

- Chaney Kourouniotis, Senior Solutions Consultant at FFW

Your Website’s Hierarchy of Needs

Moving from basic functionality to higher productivity and organizational impact requires first ensuring that your site is secure, stable, crash-proof, protected from hackers, and has met your user's expectations. Then, once you master basic functionality, you can move to analyze productivity. And when you finally have proper protocols in place, such as automated workflows and architected governance, your teams will have more of an opportunity to focus on the impact to your organization.

Chaney Kourouniotis, Senior Solutions Consultant at FFW, and John Richards, Head of Developer Advocacy here at Pantheon, discuss the impact of using WebOps practices. 

Basic Functionality Underpins Your Credibility

If you don't know how your team of marketers, designers, developers, and content creators collaborate on your website, then you need to employ a WebOps strategy. Without it, you'll fail to build the credibility you need to impact your mission because you'll constantly have to deal with a fragile website. 

Understanding your website's goal and how it aligns with your broader mission will help you map out the core functionality needed to build credibility and make your way up the pyramid. Setting up version controls, automated backups, creating multiple environments, and keeping your website secure through regular updates are all core procedures you'll need to do regularly — before you can move to the productivity level. 

Increasing Productivity

Collaboration fuels productivity, and having a WebOps strategy that connects your teams of marketers, designers, developers, content strategists, and stakeholders is required to make and keep your website at its absolute best. Another productivity component to focus on is evolving the automation used to build your functionality layer, then following it up with analysis. Take the time to see where your IT team's time is being spent and think about how to automate repeatable processes. 

Mission Impact 

Now that you've decided on your website's primary goals, it's time to measure your success in order to learn what works, and what doesn't and make future data-driven decisions. 

Creating routine checkpoints to analyze data using MarTech tools and scheduling regular reviews will help you concentrate your IT team's efforts on what counts and eliminate what doesn't. A single iteration or review of your functionality or credibility is not what keeps your website at its best. Instead, each re-examination should be grounded in real-time data that allows you to go deeper into every pillar that makes your website strong. Being a continual learner will empower you to hit your goals and help you create the organizational impact that you're looking for.

In case you missed John and Chaney's video presentation, you can preview a one-minute trailer here or watch the full thing here to learn more about how to transform your website into a mission-centric asset and so much more.