Project Management is perhaps one of the most fiercely debated and grossly misunderstood disciplines in the software field currently, hence let me throw in a disclaimer first: if you are a small team of experts and/or people well-known to each other (e.g., have worked together as a team earlier), and situated in a collocated fashion, doing a lot of ‘creative work’ that can’t be very ‘accurately’ scoped, let alone managed; you probably will find ideas of formal project management a huge overkill (on time, effort, money and might even seem to stifle creativity), and you might be better off considering ‘lightweight’ methods like Agile Project Management / Scrum in the context of software development (well, nothing stops you from deploying pieces of Agile / Scrum in a non-software context – it is based on common sense after all). Small projects, small teams can afford to define a process that exploits the tailwind:
– A small and collocated team means more direct interaction among team members and lesser management overheads in formalizing project communication (e.g., project status reporting, team meetings, etc.). This reduces the time it takes to collate, transmit and share important project information and also decreases the possibility of information distortion or confusion. A small team means there is high signal to noise ratio in team communications, is also leads to a better utilization of time spent in transmissing, receiving or digesting communication. Further, to schedule any event, one can always convene impromptu meetings around a whiteboard or around the coffee table without worrying about people’s already double-booked calendars or finding a place large enough to fit the team for the next meeting, and so on.
– Having a group of experts means there is low(er) need for managerial supervision and people are generally ‘hand-picked’ for their knowledge, skills and abilities that could typically be ‘mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive’. This ensures tight interdepency and very high mutual respect among team members. There is lesser ‘competition’ among team members and everyone knows that “united we stand, divided we fall” which fosters teambuilding.
– For a small project, a large swing in any of the project constraints (time, cost, scope) could seriously and irretrievably impact the project in a downward spiral. If the work is new to the team, it could spell bigger trouble, especially if there is no way to do mid-course corrections. Executing projects in an iterative fashion helps shorten the feedback loop and give a chance to make necessary corrections to improve its ability to stay on-course and eventually hit the target. Additionally, if there is a customer involvement on these short iterations, the quality and value of these feedbacks could improve substantially lest any decisions are made that are hard to change if required.
However, if your project is anything more than a handful of people, takes more than a few months and entails issues like external dependencies with multiple vendors and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), substantial technical and managerial risks, subcontracting / co-development, etc., you probably might improve chances of success using a formal project management methodology like PMBoK or PRINCE2 than without it. Agilists will argue and disagree with me that Agile / Scrum is not suited for large projects, but if you are new to Agile as well as to large projects, you might want to consider all options and associated risks – don’t believe in what worked for others, it might or might not work for you (remember the golden rule – we are all different), and your company might have a different set of constraints and tolerance to performance.
The size, complexity, criticality, and risk profile of a project, and organizational appetite for project risk and uncertainty, and organizational culture would generally determine the level and need of management control required, and hence one must always right-size the project management methodology based on the context. Both, PMBoK / PRINCE2 and Agile methods evolved in response to challenges seen in executing projects successfully. While PMBoK / PRINCE2 took the approach that projects most often failed due to lack right levels of management oversight, planning, execution and control; Agillists felt the key reason was the fundamental nature of software being a ‘wicked problem‘ that just could not be managed using an obsolete waterfall model of developing software – it needed a better way to develop software in short iterations with very close-knit self-managed teams.
Without getting my loyalties needlessly divided betwen the two of these approaches, I believe there are merits in both the thoughts. I refuse to believe that any non-trivial project can be managed by piecemeal iterations that give no commitment whatsoever on the overall project performance, nor give any method to assess if the overall project is indeed on the right track (so, even if first few iterations are achieving the desired ‘veolcity’, what is the guarantee that subsequent iterations will also move at the same pace?). On the other hand, doing an iterative development is highly intiutive and very effective way to learn from past experiences to plan next steps, especilly on any non-routine project that is full of unknowns and assumptions. To me, these represent ‘mix-and-match’ ideas that one should pick up and apply wherever required, without getting baptized to the school of thought. I find most process wars have taken the disproportionate dimensions of falling just short of religious wars – you have to belong to one of the camps, and must talk evil about the other camp to be seen as a law-abiding corporate citizen of that camp. In life, we borrow ideas around us – our housing society, professional volunteer society we volunteer for, our kids playground, gardening, home improvement, nature, science, religion, other cultures…without necessarily converting to another faith or religion or society just because we like an idea that we want to borrow. So why should that be required in project management methods ???
I think this process war will be won by pragmatics. Those who take a position on extreme ends of the continuum and insist on always applying a particular style as the panacea might be in for a complete surprise because no two problems were created equal. A prudent approach is to evaluate all options and then decide which is the best response to a problem, as opposed to blindly follow a project management approach ‘religiously’.
Do you follow your project management aproach ‘religiously’ ?
[From my blog Manage Well, http://managewell.net]
