Tag Archives: scrum

Software project management, the mission impossible, Part.2, Challenging situation

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In part.1 we described the situation as building a plane in the air, and mentioned some of the challenges we always face. Here we going to discuss some of these challenges in details:

Requirements are not clear.

Always happening, customer usually has a problem and usually does not know the root cause of it. In best cases customer can has a vision with defined objectives. When you meet customer stakeholders, everyone of them has a different story to tell, everyone has a different expectation. And you are trying hard to listen to all of them to form your own vision, or a common vision that can meet most of stakeholder’s requirements.

Requirements always changing.

Remember when we said in part.1 that:

” The best ever written requirement document represents only 80% of customer vision”

When you form your vision that you think is the most close to everybody’s vision and then start to develop the requirements, customer will continually gives you feedback  and ask for enhancements.

This is normal, Customer can’t judge the system without seeing it at work.

As a development team we have to consider that and accept it as a fact an axiom in software development domain. Resisting it will result in project failure.

Project is out of budget and time.

This is a logical result of requirements being changed all the time. Although the customer himself never stops asking for new requirements, but after a while he gets bored of the project, and sometimes he loses his enthusiasm and motivation and may cancel the contract.

Happened to me many times 🙂

No time for test.

If the project reached that situation, where requirements are not managed anymore, and project is out of schedule and budget, and customer is complaining, Development team usually sacrifices wit the testing time to deliver and get paid…

You can imaging what would happen next.

Time is spent on Junk.

An academic study in 2003 mentioned that

“53% of project requirements usually be cancelled as stakeholders found that these requirements are not of much value for the project, or the situation itself has been changed where they don’t need these requirements anymore”

“64% of requirements built are not used, and in best cases they use once a year”

On the personal level, i once had a project where we were developing a campus management system for a college. we build more than 120 reports according to the customer requirements. After we finished, and while we were monitoring the system at work, we found that only 10 reports are being used periodically, and more than 50 reports have never been used all over 6 years.

So,,, what shall we do ?!

In the next blog, i will follow with you best practices and learned lessons.

follow the blog to get it on time.

Software Project management, The mission impossible. Part.1 Building a plane in the Air.

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If project management is difficult, then software project management is more difficult. Actually, it is exceptional. Software development teams are usually trying to figure out a situation, analyze problems in this situation, listen to stakeholders, try to figure out stakeholders vision and thoughts about the optimum way to deal with that situation. Development team should translate outcomes of all these inputs into a running software program that works properly and solves problems.

Software development team deals with a customer vision. A vision that is not even clear and well defined. Customer only realizes that he has a problem, but in most cases, he does not know where exactly the problem is. As a result, customer always updates his requirements with time.

Software development team tries to figure out this vague vision and document it. Then works on developing a solution using technologies that keep changing every day!.

The customer environment and infrastructure is also hybrid, different running operating systems with different software solutions that are based on different database engines. And it is required that the developed system works in harmony with this hybrid environment.

And in most times, the customer has limited time and limited budget….

EDS once had a commercial that exactly explain this situation…

Yea,  Software development team are actually building a plan in the Air!

Think about it:

  • Vision with vague requirements.
  • Requirements keep changing.
  • Tools we use to build the solution keeps developing.
  • Solution need to be built while customer is running.
  • Solution need to be installed in a hybrid environments.
  • limited time and budget.

In order to succeed in software project management, you have to deal with these mentioned issues as facts and axioms, do not ever try to resist them, deal with them … Good luck

in part.2 of this article we will discuss samples of situations a software team would face with customers.

Facing Customers learned lessons, Words that customer hates

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Angry-Customers

In software development projects, one of the most hated sentence by customers is when you say to him “This is a new requirement” … when we say this sentence -as a project manager or business analyst- we usually wait for an unexpected behavior from the customer 🙂

Actually both hate it, the customer and the development company. Customer hate it because it -definitely- means extra cost and time !.
The development team hate it for the following reasons:

  1. Project manager knows that he will get into a lot of arguments, debates, and negotiations with the customer and the development team lead about the new requirements.
  2. Team leader will check if this requirement needs a major or minor changes in the system architecture. Major changes mean higher cost and also some team depression.

There is a rule in software engineering saying that

“The best ever written requirement document represents only 80% of the customer vision”

I strongly believe in this rule and i consider it one of the axioms in software development, and one of the major reasons why agile development methodologies are introduced.

Development team has to deal with this rule as a fact. Customer always asks for new requirements. This is normal, and it happens all the time. Team should think how to deal with it rather than resisting it. Team should have tactics and best practices to deal with it.

One of the management tactics i followed over years, is to manage the customer expectations and psychology. I want the customer to get used to this sentence, not to hate it. Customer should be aware that we develop his ideas and thoughts, we help him get these thoughts and ideas into real life. As a result, each time he sees part of his ideas come real, he will have comments, feedback, changes and enhancements.

Also we will let him know that not all changes require extra cost and time, but in all cases, we should fill a new requirement form. We want the customer to get used to this document and this sentence too. So when you come at a time and ask him for extra money or time, you have something to negotiate with, as you did him a lot of enhancement without any trade-off.

act like rich people

I am starting a SCRUM course…

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I am starting a course on SCRUM frame work. For those who do not know it, it is a management framework that you can use  to manage any rapid changing project or business. Usually used to manage software development teams. But i believe, any project manager in any business domain, any entrepreneur or any executive should know about it.

At the end of the course, I am planning to have video lecture on how to use scrum to manage your life and family activities.

Please subscribe to the channel hosting the course to know about new lectures, and please like and share the lecture.

Channel URL https://www.youtube.com/user/MoveITChannel

Thanks