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Software Project Management

I was a software engineer and programmer for about 20 years now and have completed many life cycles of software development. Along the way, the successful software projects had several ingredients: sound business plan, excellent project management and good sales of final product. In this article I'd like to look at some of the aspects of successful project management.

Define project

Managing project can be a daunting task. There is the vision, the product definition and milestones to deal with on day to day basis. I find that a sound management starts with accurately defined project. If you start project without specific goals, it will become a moving target. Over the lifecycle of the development, you will end up collecting many additional requrests that will have to be accomodated prior to release. You can save yourself this if you precisely specify the outcome and any additional feature will be mercilessly dumped into "future release" bucket. With well defined project you can always say that everyone saw the plans from the beginning and they should have raised an issue before development started.

Evaluate risks

What are the risks associated with each feature or dependency. What could go wrong? Will the process and technology used be flexible enough to absorb changes on deployment platform or issues with 3rd party library supplier? Think Vista and ActiveX - with UAC (User Account Control), which is enabled by default, vista users are unable to install activeX components.

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p>Any project that has a good financial visibility will have higher likelyhood of success. Figure out exactly the amount of time and resources necessary and calculate overall cost of the goal. With this price, does the market justify the development?

Set standards

Utilize the technology that is available in consistent fashion. Create performance standards to monitor progress of the project.

Manage through

Allocate resources to manage project from inception all the way through to release. Use performance standards to always determine the current progress. If you are not sure how far the development has gone, you will not be able to commit and deliver on release date.

Stay on schedule

Staying on schedule is important in preventing the snowball effect. Stay within your budget. Create contingency plans to move your project forward. Delegate responsibilities and collect timely feedback on progress. Should your project slip, work on the solution as a group.

Be confident

Above all you must be confident that you can manage the project. Knowledge of project with confidence of its success inspires development to achieve greatness.