The Complete Software Project Manager

Foreword

A generation ago, Internet pioneer Carl Malamud took issue with people who complained about bulky computers, byzantine interfaces, and buggy software: “A lot of this ‘too hard to use’ stuff will go away. Radio was so messy for the first 20 years, it wasn't funny. Cars, ditto—you had to be a mechanic to drive one.” Computers, he prophesied, would one day be as easy to use and reliable as automobiles had become, and the electronic frontier would become as simple to navigate as an Interstate with a road atlas.

That day came, of course—including Google Maps to replace the road atlas—but it brought along a paradox. The simplicity, power, and awesomeness that users and executives take for granted disguise the very technical, messy, and difficult work that happens behind the scenes. Gremlins lurk under the lid of your laptop; krakens crouch behind the scrim of your Cloud. A lot of what seems to gleam is the shimmer of WD-40 on duct tape.

Amateurs cheerfully rely on smoothly running software for business and pleasure, but the work of IT is no place for an amateur. Creating and designing systems, maintaining them, and running projects to install, fix, rip out and replace, upgrade, and integrate them—these are complicated tasks. They rarely go according to plan, because they invariably run into some obstacle that could not possibly be foreseen. Even professionals in the industry can be seduced by a project's progress into thinking, “No problem,” when they should be thinking, ...