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Project Management ScenariosModerated by Suzanne Robertson the Atlantic Systems Guild and Susannah Finzi Antelope Projects This is the Atlantic Systems Guild's forum for project managers. The scenarios posted here have been sent by project managers in the field. They have responded to the Project Management Survey. Please feel free to post comments to any of these scenarios. Or feel free to post your own scenario.
Scenario 4 Assigned to an existing project with aggressive (pre-determined) target dates. Project is to implement a new (bleeding edge) COTS with number of interfaces to existing systems. My role is allegedly to manage the development and test of the interfaces, although the development is declared as being largely complete. No sign that anything has been documented (even to the extent of no clear statement of the number, let alone the complexity, of interfaces - might be anywhere between 6 and 25). My approach would be to carry out a project assessment (ala SPMN, Chaos report, or Steve McConnell's Survival Guide) to determine where we are, then put together an action plan to improve sufficiently to increase the chances of the project succeeding. I have been told that my role is to produce the development and test plan and manage accordingly, working "with" (whatever that might mean) the existing development manager! To make life more complicated, the existing development manager is located in another country. I have serious concerns that we won't meet the dates, functionality or quality targets that people are expecting. Any suggestions as to a mutually compatible way forward gratefully received!
Scenario 3. Here some questions I have about project management: - Is it a good idea to cut down on QA for the sake of having the product out in the scheduled time? (Element of solution: The product will anyway be delayed! The quality of the product is unknown.) - Knowing that adding people to the team late in the project, may be worse, how do we deal with lack of resources in a sound and rational manner? The following is an account of my experience in my current project: I am not a manager but have some previous (and little) experience as manager. I am able to see things, but have not enough experience to act in a logical and politically sound maner. I am actually developing software on a project that has 5 team members. This project started very well with a lot of good intentions for the management as well as the process. Later, under the excuse of having not enough resources (this is the case: we are 3 developers less what we should have in our team, and QA has only 3 members that are involved in some code writing activities, as for installations), the management decided to drop the Quality Assurance steps as reviews, code walkthroughs and more and more system tests. Also the project manager does not update the schedule and or maintain a risk list. As my team leader knows and told us, we will pay for that later with more and more time necessary for debugging and fixing problems. Under pressure, I experienced that we tended to cut some steps in the process (And there is no QA on what step has been done or neglected). I could not blame the Project Manager, he took on part of the development effort by designing and coding one of the components of the product in order to help to get things done. The specifications of the software are really well defined and have been thoroughly reviewed and corrected. The specifications do not have superfluous features. There are not a lot of changes involved in the project beside low level technical changes. The high level architecture was done with enough effort to have a stable architecture. The "lack of resource" corresponds at the time the low level architecture began. Another point that did not help this, there is a different of point of view between our team leader and his boss in the way a software should be built, more precisely around the Quality Assurance and the software development process. The upper management believes in "tangible result": the source code. The positive side of these situation: the upper management recognizes that we have a lack of personnel and a hard time to find people. As well as I can tell, I believe the software will appear as it it specified but the project is experiencing delays. I am reading a lot about assurance quality and other sofware development topics as risk management and software configuration. So the theory is known. But the management do not seem to practice it. I would like to know if other managers experienced this "lack of
resource" problem and how they deal with it.
I read the scenarios at the management website, and was fascinated with scenario 3 for many reasons. Here are some: 1) It rings a familiar bell. We tend to do the same thing, but we are often saved by the fact that we have customers who require the development steps done and documented. 2) The presenter is not blaming the project manager, because "he took on part of the development effort by designing and coding one of the components of the product in order to help to get things done". That is, they were without management AND QA in a critical project phase. The presenter seems to think that was nice of the project manager. I think it was short-sighted. It indicates that both upper management and developers in the company seems to think that QA and management is something that costs the project, not something that the project benefits from. A good manager should manage in a way that helped the project, and is thus indispensable in difficult times. 3) They all knew all the way that they would not save any time at all cutting down on QA. But they doggedly went on doing it. What does that say about the communication lines between upper management and the "real world" in the company. I think they have a severe problem. 4) The interesting thing is that QA is discovering things that are there anyway, and that they should prevent errors from happening. I think the QA has a serious marketing effort in front of them, internally in their organisation. Unfortunately, my experience is that the people devoted to QA are not the most eager marketers. All in all, this scenario and the presentation of it goes to show that the thinking in the lower level of the organisation should be heard further up, and that the role of the project manager and the QA must be understood by all. An insight: If a manager shall do part of the project, it should be the part she
has little experience in doing. She will be much more competent to control
that the well-known parts of the project is well done. If she sticks to
her field of competence and leaves the darker fields to others, they will
not be under her control at all. Scenario 2. A talented worker bit off more than he could possibly chew, committed to a deadline that was probably impossible. He then made it a point of honor not to let anyone second guess him. When I tried to scale back what he had undertaken to give him a chance to make the date, he objected in very pained terms: "I can do this job, but I'm not sure I can deal with your lack of faith in me." Of course he couldn't get done on time. But I ended up letting him go down in flames to all of our embarrassment.
Scenario 1. Here is my project managament story.... A subordinate manager seems locked in a loop of managing by whining at people. I think he knows this is not a winner, but I don't know how to intervene. If you prefer to remain anonymous then there are several alternatives. If you wish to let us know who you are but nobody else, mark your submission clearly "I wish to be posted anonymously" (or something similar) and we will ensure that your name and email address do not appear on our site. Alternatively, if you wish to be completely anonymous, even from us, then use the remailer at Replay.com. You can use the remailer by sending mail to remailer@replay.com. Place two colons on the first line of your message, followed by "Anon-To: email address". Follow that with a blank line, and then begin your message. For example:
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