Author: Viktor Kajtazov, Developer
The most commonly asked questions that matters to project managers and all other project stakeholders is how to deliver a successful project. Of course, there are multiple factors that will affect your project management and make it much more difficult but I would like to concentrate on the 3 most important things that will lead you to a successful project – from a developer’s point of view!
But first let’s define what successful project actually means. From my point of view a successful project should satisfy the following three conditions:
- On time
- Within budget
- Meet stakeholder expectations
According to this, I would like to present my views on which key factors we need to consider during the entire project life cycle.
- Communication skills
Without good communication skills there is a huge risk that you would be misunderstood. Therefore, you need to assess your who you are speaking to and address them on their level of knowledge. Communication problem gets bigger when you need to have a conversation with a non-technical person and explain your idea or solution with understandable terms.
That’s why we always need to improve our communication skills by:
- Running productive project meetings ( Preparation with agenda and choosing the right people for the right meetings )
- Becoming good listeners ( Avoid interrupting your interlocutor, take notes and review )
- Making effective presentations (Understandable for your target group)
- Project planning
The quote below explains how much is important project planning.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”– Albert Einstein
This means that most of the time needs to be dedicated for project planning before project development. With other words project development would take 5 minutes if we have a good planning.
Good planning depends on:
- Project activities definition ( As much as possible atomic and detailed activity, easy to understand and estimate)
- Resource availability and allocation
3. Project Team
- We should be aware that good IT people are in short supply, because quality and time estimates depend on the effectiveness of the project team. Perfect team should consist of various types of people with different qualities like ones that care more about quality work, others that work better under pressure or solving complex issues.
These are some interesting facts when selecting project team:
- Keep team small and manageable
- Get the right personalities
- Reuse successful teams (Do not change the team that wins)
In my opinion, these 3 points should always be kept in mind during whole project lifecycle, and always when your project goes wrong try to find your mistake into them.
