Project Stakeholders archives - Quality Assurance and Project Management

Quality Assurance and Project Management:

project stakeholders

May 18 2009   10:00AM GMT

Vendor’s role in involving customer top management while requirement gathering phase



Posted by: Jaideep
Software vendor, Project Management, Software Project, Software Project Lifecycle, business study, requirement gathering, customer, customer expectations, software product, top management, project stakeholders, process owner, end user, software development, project completion, user level requirement, top level requirement

The most critical stage in software project lifecycle is business study and requirement gathering. Vendor has to be very cautious and careful in understanding all levels expectations from the product they are going to build for the customer. Skipping top level at this stage could be disastrous for both. As a vendor, if you don’t involve customer top management while gathering requirements – you are inviting a mishap!

Customer top Management involvement is very critical during the business study and requirement gathering phase of a software project. The expectations of top management shall invariably be different as compared to other stakeholders of the software project at customer end. Assuming that the requirements gathering from process owners or end users will be sufficient for developing software will be a misconception. A detailed discussion for capturing requirement and understanding top management perception is critically important to lead to a successful completion of the project.

At the Vendor end – the Project Manager has to ensure that besides capturing user level requirements, it is essential to highlight the benefits to the top management being proposed for them from the product. It is not desirable but mandatory to freeze top level expectations at business study and requirement gathering stage.

May 13 2009   9:35AM GMT

SIGNificance of Sign-offs at appropriate stages



Posted by: Jaideep
Project Management, project stakeholders, project sign-off, Project Lifecycle, project milestones, project achievements, project stages, Software Project, project manager, project vendor, project customer

Sign-off at various stages has a significant importance during project lifecycle. Everyday sign-off can be a headache for customer, no sign-off can cause headache for vendor, so there has to be a balance of sign-offs of milestones, achievements and stages of project so that the sanctity of sign-offs is retained thereby earmarking the progress of project. Both, vendor and customer have to be very careful in this aspect of project management as it is crucial for all stakeholders.

At Vendor side the Project Manager has to educate the customer management and project manager over the benefits of timely sign offs. Sign-off should not be there just for the sake of it. It should add substantial value to the project.

At Customer end the Project Manager and management should respect the timely sign-off practice but also ensuring that the activity which is being signed off has finished in actual, rightfully and rightly.