Slashdot Mirror
Advice for a New Software Project Manager?
Tom O'Neill asks: "I have recently been promoted to 'Manager of Software Development' at the small business I work for. I have been developing web-based software professionally for about 6 years. I have seen the software development cycle work and I have seen it fail. Are there any project managers out there with some advice for a green horn like myself? Are there any books or other reading material that I could read in order to manage a software project effectively?"
In all groups, there are offical, and un-official designations. I, for example, am an Infastructure Software Developer. But, I am also the team's go-to guy. I have no long term projects, only short ones, so people bring me things to work on, on the side. There are the guru's who everyone goes to and the loners or the popular people. If the boss knows the groups working, they can interact more effectivly. Also, don't be afraid to let the programmers have a little extra room to develop and imagine. If you become a slave driver, your project will fall behind and mabey even fail.
If you want to be the best, think back to when you were in the team and what your first boss (or first good boss) were like... if they sucked, do the total opposite. If they did things well, and you remember having a good time, do what they did.
I will leave you with a quote from futurama. "If you've done your job right, it won't seem like you've done anything at all." - God
while(1) { fork(); };
Well, for one, creating a good environment for the coders can help (meaning no tiny cubicles without a door)!
I have seen the term "project manager" applied to a full spectrum of job duties. I think most people will agree that a project manager is responsible for insureing that a project is completed on time and on budget. (Although that should be the responsibility of everyone.) Beyond that one goal there may be many secondary duties. Part of the confussion may be that a project manager is also tasked with other duties such as designer, lead developer, or HR management. Responsibilities will also depend on the size of the project. So the first step should be to talk with management to determine your exact responsibilities, and to talk with other project managers within your organization. Once you have an understanding of you role then you can start looking at reading material.
There are some basic management skills you will want to work on. When leading technical people you need to convince them the project is good ("buy in"). Lots is written about this and most of it can be summed up with "Treat people with respect." You need to know how to critise properly by asking the right kinds of questions. In general don't ask questions that can be answered with a yes or no. It is harder then you think. Budgeting time is very important. Gant charts (ala MS project) are usefull.
Management Speak: You needed to be more proactive.
Translation: You should have protected me from myself.
Management Speak: I'd like your buy-in on this.
Translation: I want someone else to blame when this thing bombs.
Management Speak: We want you to be the executive champion of this project.
Translation: I want to be able to blame you for my mistakes.
Management Speak: We need to syndicate this decision.
Translation: We need to spread the blame if it backfires.
Management Speak: We have to put on our marketing hats.
Translation: We have to put ethics aside.
Management Speak: I see you involved your peers in developing your proposal.
Translation: One person couldn't possibly come up with something this stupid.
Management Speak: There are larger issues at stake.
Translation: I've made up my mind so don't bother me with the facts.
Management Speak: I'll never lie to you.
Translation: The truth will change frequently.
Management Speak: Our business is going through a paradigm shift.
Translation: We have no idea what we've been doing, but in the future we shall do something completely different.
Management Speak: Value-added.
Translation: Expensive.
Management Speak: Human Resources.
Translation: A bulk commodity, like lentils or cinder blocks.
Management Speak: The upcoming reductions will benefit the vast majority of employees.
Translation: The upcoming reductions will benefit me.
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
As a manager your duty is to ensure your developers don't do things that waste time or money. You need to do at least these things:
1. Figure out what the real requirements are. Don't simply believe that customer's (in house or not) know what they need. Don't treat customer's like idiots: they are the most valuable resource you have to ensure the software you deliver is actually useful.
2. Get the business folks to prioritize the requirements so that you can reduce scope effectively. You will have to reduce scope--better to be ready for it than to be surprised when the time comes.
3. Ensure that *everything* your developers do can be traced back to a requirement. If someone is doing something that can't be traced back to a requirement they are wasting time and introducing unnecessary complexity.
4. Never forget that your job is to bring value to the business. Don't rule out non-software options when you see them.
These ideas ultimately lead to or from, depending on how you look at it, to "build only what you need".
"Shit rolls downhill" is a common misconception. Your new role is to prevent this. Protect (but do not isolate) the people below you from those above.
Not much of a secret since I talk about them regularly, but still, these are the secret rules of TQM, Six Sigma, and most other successful projects:
(1) know what you want
(2) know how to tell if you got it
(3) tell everyone (1) and (2)
(4) allow the front-line people the autonomy (and safety) they need to make changes, and
(5) reward them for achieving (1)
I've seen projects and programs and processes fail for missing any of these steps, but its pretty amazing how often people fail either (4) or (5).
The evidence suggests to me that either you can do it (presumably with some practice) or you can't.
I'm going to have to disagree with this one. Project Management in general is a pretty mature field. I deal with project managers from the oil, gas and chemical fields every day and these guys and gals are well trained at what they do. There is very little "hey, we're just good at it." Most project managers work their way up the system during their careers, learning different aspects of a project from the bottom of the project team on up. Plus, companies will send project managers to either outside PM training, or for the larger companies will have their own, interior colleges.
The reason all this time and money is spent training project managers is because a good project manager (in those fields) can literally save billions in capital costs, hundreds of millions in lost opportunity costs and workers lives. Project systems are pretty well defined and they usually require proper front-end-loading to make sure the project team knows exactly what they're supposed to be doing it before they actually start execution. Plus, there are formal risk analysis steps performed so the team knows what might come back to bite them in the ass so they can be prepared with the appropriate contingencies.
Now, with respect to software, from what I have seen anecdotally there's just not the same kind of rigor placed on most software projects, even large, very expensive software projects. The upfront definition tends to lack the type of detail you see in other (physical) capital projects. I don't know if its the idea that "Hey, its only software, its no problem if we change crap halfway through implementation" that causes this or something else, but its a killer when it comes to controlling cost and schedule, not to mention the ramifications that has on the project team (low moral, work crunches, throwing bodies at the problem, etc.).
The moral of the story (I'll stop rambling here) is that project management is very much a learned skill. Although its not as mature in the software field and software specific project management training may not be as available as more PM training specific to more traditional industries, its still worth looking to get as much training as possible. It will pay back in spades. Also, as someone above mentioned, network your butt off with other IT PMs. Learn from others what works and what doesn't work. Also, start formulating a company-wide project system with you colleagues. And go read up on the successful IT PM jobs. From what I understand Boeing did an awesome job with the software development associated with the 777. See if there are any case studies about how they did it floating around.
Now, with respect to software, from what I have seen anecdotally there's just not the same kind of rigor placed on most software projects, even large, very expensive software projects.
.Net?)
The fundamental problem is that we honestly don't seem to know what rigor to put in. I know what we need. Bob knows what we need. ISO knows what we need. Several book authors know what we need. Unfortunately, many of these things end up quite contradictory, and scientific studies are impractical and borderline impossible. Between that and endlessly moving requirements, we just haven't been able to really nail down what makes a good manager, i.e., what makes for a well managed project. It's not like most engineering projects... or rather, it's just like most other engineering projects, multiplied by ten or twenty.
(And at the risk of sounding elitist, I'd also personally add that the average programmer is really quite astoundingly incompetent, both due to the wildly changing world we live in, and a basic lack of skill (compounded by the difficulty of mentoring in said wildly changing world). Would you want to drive over a bridge where the senior engineer on the project has only three years experience in building bridges? Yet, how can you have much more than three years experience in
Every field has its own trials and tribulations, and I don't mean to minimize other fields, but software really is a mess.
I don't know if its the idea that "Hey, its only software, its no problem if we change crap halfway through implementation" that causes this or something else,
I believe the observation goes back all the way to The Mythical Man Month that this, which should be software's greatest asset and turn a software project into something vastly easier to engineer than a bridge, has been turned into its greatest liability through the mechanisms you propose, and the resulting higher-order effects.
The moral of the story (I'll stop rambling here) is that project management is very much a learned skill.
Looking back, what I meant to emphasize more is that you don't seem to be able to pick it up from books, and further that some people can't seem to learn it at all (though that shouldn't be surprising). But I did not say that as clearly as I meant to.
This might change if A: We could nail down a One True Way to manage (not even "the" one true way, "a" would do nicely) and B: Somebody wrote a good book on it. In the meantime, I just haven't seen the evidence that a real manual on management has emerged. You can benefit from a lot of people who will tell you what not to do, but there isn't so much work on what to do.
(Example: The classic Mythical Man Month book has a lot of "don't" essays, including the eponymous one that basically says "don't throw manpower at a project expecting it to be perfectly fungible", but the suggestions on what to do are tentative, untested hypotheses about building software teams on a "surgeon" model, which IIRC had a note added in the 25th Ann. Edition to the effect that he still hadn't tried it yet.)
Even if the questions were identical, its possible that new replies will yield new insights (or highlight ideas that got lost in the nether regions of the comment structure).
You don't have to reply to it if you don't want to.
Bottles.
Though you MAY have a point, it's overshadowed by your bitterness and subjectivity.
I just pooped your party.
You've been a developer, so remember what it's like. You'll be working with a lot of people who probably don't understand software development and software developers. You're the developer's advocate, so don't forget how to think like one.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Thats freaky. I also have about 13 years experience developing and some 5 - 8 years of PMing and managing other PMS.
I did read all three books and recommend them. I particularly recommend 'Rapid Deveopment' - though the name is a misnomer.
Finally my 'sagely' piece of advice is there is no one type of project, project manager or project methodology. The hard part is to match all of those to the culture, the task at hand and the clients.
For those about to die...we salute you.
I'm not talking about a manual for your product, I'm talking about keeping track of what you do, what your staff does and what the results are. It may be laborious to do so, but there will be times that you'll be glad you did. Also, you may wonder why something was done a certain way a few years ago; having some kind of knowledge base written down will be invaluable.
Document the code. Make sure that people adopt javadoc-type conventions. Check out Doxygen if you're not doing Java development, and make it a policy that people need to comment their code in places that are not painfully obvious. Programmers can be quite fat headed at times about this, because "hey, I know this, and if you can't read this then you aren't good" or whatever. What is obvious to them might not be obvious to others, and if you want to do a quick scan over some code, its easier to read a comment defining a block than figuring out their "spark of genius du jour" (sometimes people write things overly clever thinking that its more efficient when in reality its not and only making things harder to maintain).
The point of this is that:
- Your staff will not be the same forever; people move to other projects or other jobs.
- You will forget details.
- You will find it difficult to recall exactly what you and your staff did several months ago, especially if the project is large and fast moving.
I'm not saying that the above points are absolute, but in case you do find yourself in any of those positions...By keeping documentation, you will always be able to back up, defend, promote and prove (or disprove) your ability to manage. Now you just need to make sure you make the right decisions; nothing can help that except experience and good judgment.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
1. Remember, you are a professional working with other professionals. Your team consists of Software Engineers, not hackers/coders/programmers. Getting in that mindset helps a great deal, because you're not slapping together some product, you're engineering it.
2. Look into any project management methodology that uses iterative development. You want to do iterative development as much as possible.
3. Get as much detail as possible in a "written" spec up-front. It doesn't have to be a formal document, an email will do as long as you have something you can show the customer that they wrote when the requirements change.
4. Put in a formal change request proceedure, and make sure that the person actually making the change gives a time estimate for it before you agree to do it. Come back to management with the actual cost of the change in terms of missed deadlines, lost functionality, etc. This is where iterative development can save your ass, because you can push some functionality off to the next iteration with minimal effect on your current development.
4a. Require that the person requesting the change go over a minor "speed bump" in order to request a change, something on the scale of sending an email or filling out a web form on your intranet. You'd be suprised how many change requests disappear when the person requesting it has to do more than ask for it when you happen to pass by them in the hall.
As for books, your biggest problem is going to be putting in some sort of software development process. Almost every company out there still does seat-of-the-pants development, with lousy results. I'm a big fan of the Rational Unified Process, just be sure to customize it down to the parts you actually need. As another poster said, you don't need any of Rational's software in order to use RUP, just read their books about it.
Once you have some sort of process in place, the rest of the job becomes relatively easy, because you have the information you need to actually manage the process.