Effective team formation is a must for e-commerce, but it's easier said than done. Experienced talent is scarce, organizational needs are often misunderstood, and teams tend to form by trial and error. It's the project manager's job to secure the necessary staff with the right skills, identify specialized tasks that might require consultants and ensure that the team receives all necessary training.

Under any circumstances, you will have to recruit and maintain staff in Web marketing, Web production, systems administration, networking, database management, account management and customer service. Roles and responsibilities will be divided among several job descriptions.

Business Manager. The business manager is responsible for driving profit from the e-commerce project, implementing the policies stated in the business plan, and ensuring that new developments are presented to management in a way that removes the technical minutiae and exposes issues that impact business objectives. He or she will explore existing and emerging forms of Internet commerce and integrate them into the business plan, continually reviewing site capabilities.

Often, the business manager has equal responsibilities for back-end or legacy systems. His or her areas of expertise usually will be in retail, manufacturing order entry and customer service.

The business manager makes decisions about investments and expenses under a certain defined level. When a required expenditure exceeds that limit, it is the business manager who prepares the justification and secures funding.

Ultimately, the business manager has profit and loss responsibility for the site, and plays a major role in defining acceptable risks and managing risk overall. Hot topics include fraud exposure and controls, as well as Year 2000 liability and certification.

As activity at a site increases, the responsibilities often become too great for one person to handle. As a result, the business-manager position may be divided, with separate responsibility for commerce policy, customer service and project management.

The business manager role should always be filled as an in-house staff position. While consulting or vendor talent may be necessary to prime the project, don't count on a consultant or vendor to represent the organization's best interests.

Finding the right person(s) may not be easy. Does anyone in your organization have the right experience? Does your organization encourage promotion from within or are outside hires preferred? Can you realistically expect to find anyone with demonstrable real-world e-commerce experience? How will you train if you promote from within? While hiring from the outside may be more expensive, will everyone benefit from a fresh perspective?

Application Specialist. The emergence of packaged solutions for the Internet market has introduced a new role for an application specialist. Previously, application specialists on the back end dealt with ERP, HR or accounting systems. Any e-commerce site will require extensive hands-on system administration staff to install and maintain storefront, catalog, EDI, tax and other applications.

Many project planners fail to anticipate the demands that e-commerce makes of the application specialist and--wrongly--assume a part-timer will do. After initial planning and installation, Murphy's Law typically asserts itself and you will have to upgrade while the site is still in development.

Load-testing will result in extensive research into configuration parameters, followed by more load-testing. In beta, some alerts will go unnoticed, requiring automated alarm response. After phase one, the business manager will want to install an optional subscription service module. A new product launch will require a separate Internet domain. The administrator must create that domain, and register certificates and keys in the e-commerce package.

Meanwhile, a constant stream of new pages, custom-code development, sales-tax changes, log files, storefront price adjustments and other business policy changes need to be deployed, placed in a version-control system and otherwise managed.

Still think you can get by with a part-time administrator or that the Web server administrator can develop the required skills? Think again.