Challenges Causing Software Project Delays, Part I
Development teams always face various challenges when trying to meet up with the delivery time. This is inevitable. As a consequence, project timelines can significantly be affected, resulting in software project delays.
Do project owners always wonder what the problem is? Of course, they do. The root cause may be unforeseen circumstances, but in most cases, these problems are issues they can avoid.
A project should remain in the means of its expected duration and budget plans. Thus, it should involve adequate preparation and management. Considering these, project owners can save money, time, and still hit their goals.
Let’s review the most prominent challenges that result in software project delays and what you could do as a project owner to avoid them. Apparently, with this list of important factors that cause delays, you can resolve the problems faster, keep on with the project, and deliver on time.
Poor Requirements Definition or Sudden Change in Specification
“Clarity of vision is the key to achieving your objectives.” — Tom Steyer
A project can not be well planned without full specifications or requirements. Therefore, it’s your duty as a project owner to sleep on the requirements and ensure that it tallies with your project vision without ambiguity, omission, or the possibility of frequent future changes. Consequently, if your requirements are misunderstood or have a missing part, it can affect the timing of the project or cause it to fail.
Poor project requirements or changes in specifications call for clarity from the project owner, this in return results in loss of time. However, if the need for clarification arises, encourage the development team to fizzle out all ambiguity with you. Furthermore, your clarification will stop the software developers from second-guessing your intentions.
Expressing clarity will save you from unnecessary software project delays and having to re-do the errors from misunderstanding.
Insufficient Time and Efforts in Planning
“If I had 8 hours to chop down a tree, I would spend 6 hours sharpening my ax.” — Abraham Lincoln
Anything worth doing is worth doing well. This saying applies to the planning stage of any software development project. No doubts that planning requires expertise and lots of experience in development and non-development tasks.
You can call it the art of getting ready. For example, your designs and other vital instruments should be set and handy before coding starts. You have to specifically consider the allocation of resources for numerous tasks involved in your IT projects such as coding, environment set-up, and testing. Create adequate time to plan and don’t start your project until the strategy is complete. Lastly, don’t dive into a project without a solid roadmap for it, and never ignore the smallest details as they can result in spending more time.
Over Optimistic Time Estimates
“Promise little, but deliver much.” — Unknown
Sometimes developers provide unrealistic estimates for projects. Unfortunately, they believe that they can complete a project sooner than it should take. The reason can be a genuine estimation error, overconfidence, or being too optimistic. The results are work pressure, a decline in efficiency, and errors, which cause the extension of project time.
On the other hand, project owners don’t scrutinize the estimated time proposed for projects. In most cases, eagerness and passion are responsible for this. You dream of a product release, and you want it as soon as possible. At the same time, you want good software at a good rate and in the shortest interval of time.
Your project managers should make provision for unpredictable situations along the way when estimating time for a project. Collectively, it must cover all the stages of production including testing and deployment to ensure perfect delivery on time.
Losing Key Development Team Members or Having Work Overload
“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”
— Richard Branson
The IT world is very dynamic, and developers have their professional interests changing so fast like moods. Developers switch jobs frequently, just like in any other field of daily businesses. Therefore, anticipate that at least one or more members of the development team will quit for another job before your software project ends.
The loss of a team member has more gravity and effect, especially if the person is a key player in your project. The result may lead to a delay in an ongoing project. As a counter move, you need to replace the absence of such a team member with someone that has matching skills to cover the void. As an alternative, the solution is to split the task between other members. The disadvantage here is that it could result in work overflow, especially if such a team has other projects hanging on them.
According to experience, the only way to avoid this pitfall for you as a product owner is to previously ask your team of developers, or software vendor: What are the back-up plans if a worker exits the team while the project is still on? What happens in the case of work overload?
Competence demands that there should be partners or contractors that can help to cover up for important absentees in a small team. As for big teams, they can easily adjust to the loss of a team member because of their size.
