Software development can happen with or without a formal project management practice within your organization. Hard to believe? May be, but it’s true. Read on.
If you are running your organization lean then you definitely do no want the additional management costs and organization disruptions caused by project management. Your software development goals can be easily accomplished using your existing systems department (or a similar organizational unit) which I’m assuming is quite well setup using functional organizational structure, and that can be spun around to use the project approach.
You should consider this simple criterion to evaluate the desirability of having a formal project management with in your organization.
a. Find out if the job your department is about to take on is large or technically complex. If the job is large or technically complex and challenging, then you should consider a formal project management approach within your organization. Why? Because such complexities often require and deserve close management attention, that is available with formal project management only.
b. Find out if the job involves the integration of many components into a functioning, operational whole. Having a single individual representation for such jobs can help reduce redundancy of float information and clears out the communication blubber. Thus having project management enables better handling of interaction between various components.
c. Another thing to consider is to find out what your management wants. If your management is leaning towards having a single individual that should be available at all times as a focal point regarding information and responsibility, then you definitely need project management. Management also might require such an individual to scrutinize budget, and manage schedules of the job.
d. Find out whether a group of people with different skills-set need to be brought together in order to achieve a common goal. If your job does requires such a diverse set of professionals, then you need a project management environment within your organization. This way the group interactions can deserve a goal oriented leadership to reach its end objective.
e. Finally, you need to, closely look, at your organization whether the requirements for the job are changing or needing revisions every now and then. Having a project management approach will help your organization solve this kind of problems, bring an agile perspective to changing needs with in your organization and will help in gaining a better rate of customer satisfaction within the organization.
Though having presented all these interesting points, it is fascinating to find out that the majority of software projects fail because of poor adoption and application of project management practices. There’s no hard and fast rule for doing or executing software project management. Adaptability to the development environment in correspondence with the organization, and its subsequent applicability to the needs of the development project are critical to any software development project; and, if either of this is missing then the software projects cannot be a success.
