Small in-house tech teams often face uphill battles in big corporations

I’ve just been recently working a 6 month contract in a large firm. I do think a lot of these problems are real:

Departmental feuds

Too often, a website becomes a battleground for pre-existing departmental conflicts. Political power plays can manifest themselves in fights over home page real estate or conflicts over website ownership. After all, is the website an IT function or a marketing tool?

Uninformed decision-makers

Rarely does an internal Web team have the authority to make final decisions on a website. Instead decision-making happens higher up in the organization. Unfortunately, although these individuals have more authority, they do not have greater knowledge of the Web. Decision-making is often based more on personal opinion than the needs of users or business objectives.

Committees

Committees are the curse of larger organizations. The bigger the organization, the more the number of people who want their say, and that leads to committees. Unfortunately, committees inevitably lead to compromise and design-on-the-fly. Both are the kiss of death to any Web project.

An inward perspective

Becoming institutionalized is very easy in a large organization. Eventually you speak an internal language and think in terms of organizational structure. This proves problematic when communicating to end users. Not only do most large organizations have their own internal perspective of the world, some individuals even think departmentally, further aggravating departmental conflict.

Endless scope creep

When an in-house Web team is constantly available, calling on their help is easy. This is both a benefit and a curse. The truth is that many Web teams are taken for granted, and websites that should never exist are built and launched because there are no constraints. Worse still, good projects can be drowned as “internal clients” keep demanding additional functionality that the Web team cannot block.

Problem people

The bigger the organization, the higher the chance they will hire a jerk. If you work for a large organization, I can pretty much guarantee you have someone in mind as you read this. These people can really hinder the work of the Web team and prevent a website from reaching its full potential.

Glacially slow progress

With endless red tape and painful committees, getting stuff done in a large institution can be nearly impossible. It is not unusual for projects to grind to a halt entirely because they become dependant on other systems or projects yet to be implemented. I have even seen something as simple as the roll-out of a content management system take years to implement.