When you drill right down to it, everything to do with web management can be reduced to just 3 elements. These are:

1. Activities: The things you do
2. Resources: The things you need
3. Scale: A metric that predicts how the components above take shape

It may seem surprising that 3 elements can accommodate all the detail of online operations - but as a conceptual model, it works. The first step is to quantify the magnitude of your management burden.

Scale

Scale is a measure of the size, technical complexity and levels of engagement of a site and can give an immediate estimate of your operational load.

In short, as each of these dimensions grow, your web management activities will expand in both volume and granularity. For reference the activities of online operations can categorised into 4 broad groups:

• Leadership
• Development
• Maintenance
• Infrastructure

Finally, to cope with an increase in operational activity, additional investment in common web resources is needed to keep the show on the road. Typically, these resources encompass:

• People
• Processes
• Tools
• Budget

The greater the operational load, the more costly and specialised these resources will become.

Web managers as shopkeepers

The good thing about this model is that it can be applied to any type of website or intranet. The core activities and resources stay the same—the only thing that change sis the underlying Scale of the operation.

When you think about it this model makes a lot of sense.

By way of analogy, consider management in a different domain—say, the bricks-and-mortar world of retail.

Read the full article "A web of shop keepers - web management explained".