August 2009
Beginner
252 pages
6h 2m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
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Chapter 1. Get Users Involved As Early As Possible
PAST PATTERNS OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT involved getting user requirements and then going off to do the coding and testing under a veil of great secrecy. After all, the users wouldn't understand what we were doing anyway, right? At the end of the project, our magician's magic cloth was whisked away and the user was expected to "ooh" and "ahh" at the brilliance of what we had produced. However, all too frequently the reaction was, "Well, I know you went to a lot of work, but what I really wanted was...."
Today, the secret to project success is to involve the users almost as soon as there is anything visible to show them. How much better it is to find out that there are problems with what we are developing early on, rather than after the project is complete!
Costs for changes become increasingly high the further along we are on the project schedule timeline. The time to recode, retest, and rework the immediate software, as well as to test integration with all the peripheral code involved, can delay the project substantially. And both time and cost baselines are jeopardized if a change is so major that it has to go through a lengthy Change Control Board process for approval.
Programming decisions over very minor issues, which make perfect sense to the software developer and the project manager, may create chaos back ...