Redesigning a Web site can be a huge undertaking for an organization and involve far more people, areas, and resources than anticipated. One of the respondents explained, “One of the reasons I said before that we’re going to focus on three or four [documents] is the fact that’s manageable. If we tried to do every [document], we’d be in serious trouble. But I think we’re smart enough to know that. But we’d sure like this to work right out of the box and ... have something we can use. But that’s just not a realistic expectation. So managing the ambition, managing the resource, is going to be very important.”

Evaluating the appropriateness of goals is important for two reasons. First, goals that are too ambitious can negatively affect willingness to participate and support the project. A public information officer emphasizes this situation: “When I said that setting goals that are too ambitious, I think that’s kind of a no-brainer, at least for me, because once you do that, you set the bar too high. Then if you don’t meet it, everybody gets annoyed at you. There has to be a willingness; there has to be a buy-in by the people at the top.” By recognizing overly ambitious goals, public managers can scale back plans accordingly to mitigate unrealistic expectations. “I know we struggled,” said one Testbed member regarding this balance, “and I know a lot of the other agencies did too with just having bit off more than we could chew.”

Second, the ambitiousness of the goals should not be confused with the feasibility of the project. XML for Web site management offers good flexibility for scaling back projects to fit an organization’s capabilities, while still delivering benefits. For example, an organization may start a project planning to convert all 10,000 pages of its Web site to XML because of potential benefits. Then, management may see that it is too much to tackle based on available resources and expertise. So they can scale back to just convert the most popular publications and still derive the benefits of single-source and content consistency, while creating a model for future applications of XML. An IT manager of a medium agency explains how they set their goals to work on a more doable project at the beginning: “Instead of taking our Internet site, our public Web site, and making changes to that, we’re going to take our intranet site and convert that first into our content management package, and then convert it to XML, to use XML.” In the end, it can be a positive experience, as summarized by another agency participant: “We went off in the wrong direction a couple of times, but I think [it] was just part of the learning process.”