A Project Manager's Diary

They took some time to plan for the trip… They drew the road map, bought some food and beverages… and got equipped with the necessary tools… They were going to travel through the woods to draw the magnificent scenes which were observed by their neighbors early this year… This wasn’t their first trip together as a team, though they were all excited… The bus driver was in charge for making the big decision in the trip while taking care of the travellers’ team while of course driving the bus and communicating daily with his supervisor in the station. The map was clear, the weather was very well studied, though the bus driver expected to pass by some pitfalls in the road as there were some reparation in the way. He reported this to his supervisor and requested to take some more supplies just in case they have to camp one or two days more, but the supervisor refused “ the trip has to be completed on time and the painting should be ready for sale by the end of the week ” Anyways, ...

Software is by far different than tomatoes! Software development depends heavily on the following factors: Requirements clarity Business complexity Client maturity Team understanding for the requirements Team experience Team productivity People mood Technology Aiding tools availability Company processes and strategy Any of these factors or the combination of these factors can heavily impact the project and its estimate. I am not saying that we cannot estimate projects, I am saying that we cannot estimate accurately, and even if the estimate is accurate, given other circumstances, the same estimate may not be accurate. The major difference between Software and other merchandises is that Software cannot really be measured. There were and are many efforts and theories trying to quantify Software and measure it, yet there is nothing accurate. Software can be measured by complexity, lines of code, effort, features, points… too many theories and models, yet none of ...

“ We need a piece of software ”… “ ABRACADABRA ”… “ Et voilà, votre software est prêt * ”… A perfect Software is up and running in no time! Is this possible? Till now, I haven’t seen this in custom development projects, specially that most of the projects I worked in varied between medium and large sizes projects (we’ll talk about projects’ sizes in details later). The majority of clients believe that Software is Magic , they think that developers just dream about the program code and then it comes to life with no effort… We all wish we can reach this stage, but unfortunately, the production of new software still takes time, effort and money… Software is maturing… People are not I remember when I was a kid and I started learning programming, I invented a language of my own and I used it to write my diary. The language was simply a set of symbols very similar to the Latin character set. People around me thought “ She is writing Computer ”, this is the exact sentence they used to descr...

In addition to the very well-known techniques/lifecycles for project management, I found out that a new technique emerged lately. This new technique highly depends on performing project tasks and phases in a reverse non-organized order! This is known as the Project Baxecution (Project Backward Execution) concept. It embraces the following practices in addition to the Surprise factor which is a common factor at the end of each stage: Deliver the project before getting the requirements (because it is not important!) –> Client is surprised Test the project after receiving some of the requirements –> Testing team is surprised Develop the project after reviewing bugs –> Development team is surprised Plan for the project –> Top management is surprised Gather the project’s requirements –> Client is surprised again Restart the project in the same order, kind of Spiral Development model –> Everyone is surprised!! Just to clarify, this is a stand-alone technique that ...

A friend of mine used to classify projects into 2 mutually exclusive categories: Strategic or Political projects Profitable projects At first, I thought this classification was a joke, but after some contemplation, I found that it is very true… Most or almost all of the projects I worked in fell under the first category (strategic). This means that I was either always chosen to work in such projects or that all projects are strategic non-profitable ones!! Which of course cannot be true, so, let’s stick to the first assumption! Strategic Projects Characteristics First of all they are… Strategic! Either start with quick-wins or are major-projects Non-profitable Low or no price quotation offered with pleasure to clients Very tight in time Killer teams are allocated on them Strategic importance and priority only apply on the team who works in the project, i.e. not on other needed helper functions such as IS, DB or Operations teams Teams working in them are burned o...