You can make every software development project successful.

Interested?

Ready?

Here’s the secret: Apply PMI’s project management knowledge areas.

It’s that simple.

I’ve been in software development since before high school, and have seen every type of success and failure imaginable. Maybe your project isn’t year-long, involving 200 people across many countries with a budget of a hundred million dollars. Maybe it’s five developers in a basement for a couple of months. I don’t know the particulars of your situation, so I couldn’t do the business analysis necessary to suggest one development methodology over another. Instead, I’m suggesting that the application of knowledge will make your projects better in general. If you understand these knowledge areas, and understand them well, you will understand what trade-offs you are making in your process and projects. That will enable you to better direct your projects to successful outcomes, regardless of the size of your project or development methodology you choose.

In order, the top ten reasons for failure, in order of importance:

1. Communication Management – Three articles on communication so far. That wasn’t an accident. Projects, first and foremost, live or die by communication.
2. Risk Management – The solution has been architected, coding has progressed, things are looking good, however the implementation can’t be stabilized. Review indicates a different architecture must be chosen. The schedule is blown, the budget is gone, the project fails. The qualification and quantification of uncertainty is what risk management is about. Every project I’ve seen that failed to “make its dates” had no risk management strategy. It’s not only identifying risks, it’s actively communicating and managing them in a timely manner. A good risk plan will save a project by stating what conditions it will trigger and how act appropriately to manage the impact. Think of it as carrying an extra set of batteries for when you take photos on vacation. Batteries die? No problem! You have another set. Yup, it cost a little money – but documenting your vacation experience is priceless.
3. Time Management – The usual cycle is for managers to look for estimates, wring every bit of “buffer” out of estimates (the estimator’s attempt to manage uncertainty, which is to say risk), then create a ship date. Has this ever produced an on-time project? Not that I’ve seen. A schedule is a map of the project. It contains all activities (scope), resources to complete (cost), and when those resources need to do the work (time). Failure to create a realistic schedule, then failure to manage against it, cause project failures.
4. Integration Management – This failure happens on two dimensions. The first is the organization’s leadership doesn’t believe that they need any project management, so either fails to have a project manager or fails to listen to an experienced project manager. The second version of this failure is assigning a project manager who doesn’t have the knowledge or skills to do the job. “You’re great at laying bricks, Bob – we’d like you to manage the construction of our next building.” Unfortunately, Bob is great at bricks, but doesn’t know anything about monitoring and controlling a project.
5. Scope Management – As the project progresses on an agreed plan, things get added – hey, it should be a simple fix to allow users to change background colors, right? Sure! Scope is everything you’re going to do, and, inversely, everything you’re not going to do. Poor change control, along with an unwillingness to adjust either schedule or cost baselines, results in failed development projects. Every accepted change changes the whole project; have a change control process. Reject scope when appropriate, or accept and re-plan other aspects of the project.
6. Stakeholder Management – The project was completed in record time, and is ready for implementation. The IT director is assigned the job of deployment and says, “Hey, wait – this won’t work. Half our users are only intermittently connected!” There are basic questions for the start of every project: Were all the stakeholders enumerated? Where their needs and requirements considered? What is the urgency of solution delivery? Failures in this area causes work products to be rejected. Scrum tries to control for this with a product owner who is the source of requirements, but also assumes the product owner has done the right business analysis and thoroughly understands all other stakeholders. If the product owner isn’t a business analyst, you’re probably doing it wrong.
7. Cost Management – A project merrily moves along, assuming full dedication of all personnel. The reality is that developers are often assigned to many different projects. Managers often fail to account for that and consequently over-allocate developers. Part of that is failure to account for the productivity loss in context switching. Also, managers wrongly assume their project is top priority. Just because it is important to YOUR career doesn’t mean it’s important to someone else’s! Adding more developers doesn’t necessarily mean a project gets done quicker, even if those developers are more senior. As the number of people go up, more work is lost to the “friction” of working cooperatively.
8. Quality Management – Yup, we wrote a lot of code. Too bad it doesn’t work in integration. Guess we should have planned for that. A quality acceptance plan is important to ensure a development project meets the goals that are set out for it. It can also be a check against gold-plating.
9. Procurement Management – Okay, okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one: Manager throws out an RFQ, picks the lowest quote, and three months later gets something that doesn’t remotely resemble what was expected. There’s a whole process for managing procurement properly. Not every project has a procurement component, but if one does, it is essential to manage it properly.
10. Human Resource Management – Each part of this list has started with a dreary failure. Instead, let’s talk about success. A couple years ago, Avengers was a popular movie. I held a “bug smash” (“bash” == “finding”, “smash” == “fixing/resolving”) for one of my teams. It was Hulk-themed, as in “HULK SMASH!” A twice daily report went out recapping the contest, morning and night, for a week. We gave out $50 gift cards along with Hulk-themed prizes for most bugs, most severe bugs, most code reviews completed and most helpful as nominated by peers. It was the most fun we’d had all summer and a good team building exercise. Be a source of motivation and inspiration, and celebrate success with your team.

There you have it – your spell book for success. Go study, then be successful.