Six Tipping Points to Project Success
posted Tue May 01 21:09:04 +0000 2007 - permalink
From a tip from the Harvard Business Review's IdeaCast
come some tips on project wrangling, and I'll try to wrangle them
into ways software development team leads can use them for project
guidance.
- KISS. Keep it simple when you are starting a project out. When you are drafting that Software Requirements Specification, make the language mitigates those lofty goals and is clear. Lots of SRS' like to add in whimsical little statements of purpose that read like mission statements. As Computer and Information Science grads, we take great pride in our ability to generate specificity (and thus inherent complexity) in our definitions. Quite the opposite, we need to learn when starting a project to start simple and allow the complexity (which we all know is there) develop naturally which should help lead to more elegant systems and a better understanding by the stakeholders involved.
- Challenge assumptions. Stakeholders and development teams can sit in a meeting for several hours believing everyone in the room is talking about the same thing -- then suddenly realize they actually aren't and have to start over. Challenge assumptions early in any project by coming up with with small, quick definitions to share.
- Speak the same language. The definitions themselves are a way to build the system around the language being used by the stakeholder, and eases the technical to non-technical language barrier.
- Discuss resources early. This should be natural, but also be thinking about schedule, your other projects, and maintenance plans after deployment.
- Continuously monitor performance. How else can you benchmark yourself to improve on later?
- Develop execution ability. This may be inherent in your hiring decisions and continuing education, but it also depends on the ability to elicit buy-in and motivate teams to deliver.