ProjectLifeCycle

Large Project – a scare for Development (or Project) Manager – if not managed properly!

A large software development project can become scary for the development manager who is handling the project provided (s)he is lacking the experience and ability to manage people, machines, requirements and time in appropriate manner. A balanced control is the call of the time at this juncture, to give the project a right start by understanding the requirements well and selection of right people for the job. The development process needs to be planned and executed well for which a root level monitoring and control is mandatory. Having good knowledge and skills required to lead the development team goes haywired if these skills and knowledge are not executed timely and properly. The project manager or development manager has to understand the core relationship of software development with overall software product engineering, the estimated time and costs, and above all the software process being followed.

On the basis of the project requirements, the project manager has to decide upon the right life cycle model, requirements analysis, environment in which the product is to be built, control of configuration (both server and client level), development team management, and quality assurance. This is not at all easy, and can be achieved only by winning over each situation.

Being a Project Head – do you interact, interject or both?

A project head has to interact most of the time with inter and intra team members, management, customer key users, customer management and so on. Intra team members include his project leaders, project members, functional consultants, and technical leads. On intra teams front he has to continuously interact with quality head and testers. During development and implementation he has to interact with customer key users who are always interested in project development status and implementation plan. With each of these mentioned, he not only has to interact but at times (or often) he has to interject too. So a project manager has to have expertise not only in interaction but also in interjection.

Let us illustrate some situations in both the scenarios, i.e. interaction and interjection of a project manager with the various agencies (individuals or teams) in and out of organization, being part of the project. An interaction situation could be termed as a normal situation part of routine exercise. An interjection could be a situation where an abnormality has arisen out of normal routine activity and project manager’s intervention in that situation to bring the progress to the normal path.

Examples of interaction and interjection situation can be:
Interaction situations: Review of development, review of testing report, project update to own management, project update to customer management etc.
Interjection situations: Approaching customer management in case of key users interest is getting lost in the project, review of code with developer and educating him the alternative coding path being better, Alarming quality head in case testing is getting delayed or testers not performing relevant important tests.

10 Skills to make a perfect Project Manager

A Project Manager is the key center position for running a successful software project. To run this show successfully, a project manager has to be a possessor of following 10 basic skills as listed below:
1. A good HR manager, to manage his team, needs to have strong interpersonal skills so that he is able to maintain a cohesive team who works in collaboration. He has to be a strong bonding agent in his team and the other teams working on the project.
2. He should work as a focused manager looking at positive aspects of his team members, without letting any unwanted behavior of his team members affecting the project. He should have a good relationship with his and other team members even if he doesn’t like in person few of them.
3. He should be always be in a comfort zone and make others feel in a comfort zone. For this he may have to show a tremendous confidence in himself and others.
4. Project Manager should have excellent presentation skills as he is the person who is the window between the customer and his organization. To update, convince and win the customer about the progress of software development, the progress of implementation and the completion of project i.e. sign off from customer at various stages, the project manager has to sell himself by having marvelous presentation skills
5. Project Manager has to inculcate the leadership skills in all his team members so as to make them independent in handling adverse situations and coming out of it successfully. Also in this way he will have to burn less energies in tackling each situation.
6. Project Manager has to have strong technical skills so that his team members do not lose confidence in him or do not fool him in technical aspects of the project. Although he doesn’t have to do much of the technical work with his own hands but still having those skills to understand how his team members are doing and whether they are in the right direction, is very important during development and implementation.
7. Project Manager should be a firm believer in the Japanese term KAIZEN. He should ensure in making everyone believe that improvement has no end and is a continuous process.
8. Project Manager, along with having good presentation skills, should have equally strong communication skills too. During project lifecycle, 50% of his time is the acid test of his communication abilities.
9. Project Manager should be a strong estimator, a proactive in this regard. He should be able to estimate the progress of each individual, the skills of each member, the abilities, the show stoppers during the project, the customer delays or any other activity where an estimation is required.
10. And last but not the least, a Project Manager should be good parent, in regard to understanding himself, his team members, management, customer, other teams, peers – i.e. all involved in the project. He should have a good understanding of his words he is going to speak to his customer, the instructions he is going to give to his team members, the decisions he is going to take. He should be well aware of impact and effect of each of the activity he does during a project lifecycle.