Our top tips for successful Technical Project Management
Delivering success, on time and on budget, requires not only the ability to follow a process, but also people skills, the ability to achieve compromise, and the ability to foresee, avoid and overcome technical issues.
Here are our top ten tips from our article on Successful Technical Project Management, distilled from years of experience in deploying enterprise business software solutions.
- Establish the project's business requirements and success
criteria
- Understanding the underlying business requirements will help steer the project to success which, in the end, is all about delivering business value.
- Define, and be able to justify, all the functional
requirements
- Functional requirements should be clear and distinct such that each can be prioritised, tracked and measured and, where appropriate, responsibility delegated.
- Understand the business-as-usual working environment
- Software solutions need to operate within an existing technology landscape. Compatibility, interoperability and security issues need to be considered.
- Understand the implementation design options available
- Functional requirements can invariably be implemented in many ways, using different combinations of platforms, products, configurations, and customisations.
- Use all the available experience
- Success requires teamwork. The more experience you can draw upon the greater your success.
- Communicate regularly in both written and verbal form
- Many people rely on email simply out of habit, rather than picking up the phone. Verbal, and face to face, communication is often clearer and more efficient. Written information should be concise.
- Don't assume that everything will go well, because it won't
- Assumptions will be proven false, software will have bugs, unforeseen changes will be required.
- Define your quality assurance and testing approach early
- Leaving it until the implementation phase is complete is way too late!
- Take great care in planning system changes to minimise the
risk of disruption
- The final steps to rollout out a new or revised system should go ahead without issue, with sufficient preparation, but it is necessary to be prepared for the unexpected.
- Plan for post launch activities
- Once a system has been launched it should become part of the normal operations of the company. However, during early activities, as the system "beds down", lessons will be learned...
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