project monitoring

The life of a Project Manager in a Software Project

At the birth (inception) of a new software project the project manager is puzzled and confused just trying to gather and understand customer requirements. He starts like a wanderer in the dark islands of customer for collecting various requirements and understanding their business norms. The moment he is able to collect this information, he aggregates to get the stock of ‘total requirements’. Understanding this makes him getting into ‘catching the rhythm’. Now comes his planning phase where he has large ‘in depth’ discussion with his development teams. By identifying different milestones for various project stages, he prepares a project plan. At this stage he is supposed to discuss this plan with customer and get ‘in sync’ with him. Once approved from customer, he breaks this plan into different stages plans to hand over respective plans to their ‘stage owners’. Development plan goes to development manager. Quality plan goes to QC head. Implementation plan goes to implementation head (himself mostly). Accordingly each stage milestones are identified which might be more than overall project milestones shared with the customer.

Then starts the actual war phase – the development phase. Meetings, discussions, brainstorming, logs, monitoring are all the weapons of this war phase. A product gets birth during this phase which gets vetted by quality control team. Documentations are also integral part of this phase.
Various test phases occur during and post development or build phase. Smoke testing, Unit testing, module testing, performance testing, security testing, load testing, functional testing… to name a few.

Now the baby has started walking. So baby is dressed well to take it to the grand function taking place at customer site. The function is ‘Implementation’. This is a long function, comprising of baby show, meetings, discussions, demonstrations, recordings, UAT, training etc. Once the baby is able to walk neatly in front of all the guests at the function, all praises fall on baby. The ceremony closing takes place. Project manager adds one more bullet of ‘confidence’ in his gun.

And starts over again for a new project.

Project Overrun – what is crucial – time, money or both?

A classic scenario happened in an organization recently as told to me by a project manager of that organization engaged in software development and implementations.

It is related to project overrun.

A new project started with a set of requirements from a customer for development and implementation. It was an overseas project so project cost was comparatively higher than the domestic project. The respective teams for business requirements, development, configuration and implementation were formed. All went well till the implementation phase. The implementation team was ready to take the charge for on-site visit with the product to launch there.

The implementation phase planned was 4 months. Somehow due to a mix of reasons, it took 18 months to complete the implementation.

The team came back after successful implementation. The customer paid the full project cost as was accepted upon in the beginning.

The project was declared as successful without any overrun. For overrun cost was taken the criteria and since full cost was recovered, it was treated as not overrun project.

Is that right?

Throwing some points to ponder upon:
The cost that had to come 14 months back came now.
The team that has to return 14 months back arrived now.
In this period of 14 months atleast 3.5 projects of similar nature and size would have been completed.
The project manager is over-optimistic.
Project monitoring was very poor.
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

6 mandates for Supplier Organization on Software Project Ownership

Ownership is a big issue in a software project. Customer organization assumes that since they are spending money, it is the sole responsibility of supplying organization to make the project a success. Vendor organization on the other hand assumes otherwise. Who is right? I think both are wrong at their ends. A Project can never become a success while the two agencies involved act as separate islands. Both have to take the equal ownership to make it a success.

The six important mandates that a vendor organization should follow in that regards can be listed as below:
1. Involvement of top management is mandatory: Involvement of top management of the organization engaged in development of software product for an external customer has to be involved in the complete project lifecycle to make it a success. This does not mean a day-to-day involvement in monitoring the progress but there should be some metrics to monitor the overall progress at any moment of time. Another aspect is involvement of top management gives a serious impact on the progress of the project.

2. A dedicated project manager should be nominated for the complete project lifecycle: Right at the Project Initiation phase, a dedicated project manager needs to be assigned for the project. The selection of project manager should be very carefully done, keeping in mind that not only he should be expert in managing a project but he should have ample business knowledge also related to the project he is being assigned to manage.

3. Role of project manager and team has to be well defined at the start of a project: The roles and responsibilities are important to be defined well in advance to clear any ambiguities and to smoothen the progress path.

4. The project manager will act as a consultant to the customer regarding project plan and its adherence: It is the sole responsibility of customer project manager (and in turn their top management) regarding availability of customer project manager and key users in various stages of the project as agreed upon. Project Manager and the supplying organization have to act as a consultant. The responsibility to gear up the progress falls on the customer team. Vendor team can help them in support and educate them on how to achieve it.

5. The management has to ensure that the project manager and the team chosen for the customization/ development have to have enough business knowledge (of their respective domain) apart from technical skills: As mentioned above regarding the project manager, the same holds truth for developers, and testers too. Without reasonable business knowledge, even the expert developers and testers will not able to do the full justification to the product being built/ developed.

6. Project Manager has to ensure during the project lifecycle that the person who is signing off the requirements, UAT, and other stages from customer end is authorized person from customer management to do so: Many a times it happens that in a very busy scenario or with some other top priorities in hand, the customer management instead of releasing appropriate person for the relevant job, ask some junior person to do so which creates lot of issues.