Do’s and Don’ts of Project Management in the IT Industry
Businesses today are thriving to obtain enterprise technology solutions that help the entire organization to work seamlessly and achieve its goals. With the emerging technology, the IT industry has shown a rapid boom within the last few decades. This in turn has led to a significant demand for a Project Manager to handle complex IT projects. Project management is an extensive and critical field in the IT industry, given the technological needs and risks associated with the business and technology both.
Managing projects is a daunting task as the major duties lie on the shoulders of a project manager who is responsible for the overall completion and success of a project. A project manager ensures to thoroughly understand the customer’s requirement, be vigilant in his actions and work as a junction between his team and the stakeholder(s) involved.
However, there are a number of approaches to project management when dealing with IT projects. For software products, picking up the right method is what you need.
Although the waterfall isn’t dead, agile is more of an appropriate choice to manage riskier projects. The agile methodology ensures that customers periodically check the product and their requirements are met. It keeps all the stakeholders toward a common goal. With waterfall, the client and/or end-users are excluded and the testing is hampered until the completion.
Keeping in mind the distinctive methodologies, it is sometimes difficult to decide which method is right for a particular project. However, whichever method you select, the below do’s and don’ts are effective to ensure smooth project execution.
The DO’S of Project Management in IT:
Do engage actively:
The rule of thumb is to keep strong communication with your stakeholders. Whether it is your customer, the technical team, or management, they should have a clear picture of your deliverables. As a front-line manager, you should constantly engage with these parties until project completion.
It is crucial to be transparent in your engagements. Talk about any concerns you have or even if there is a problem, don’t be afraid to share with the stakeholders immediately.
The key is to maintain a cordial relationship with all the parties because the project’s success is dependent on effective communication and the exchange of feedback and constructive criticism.
To keep easy communication channel, file sharing, tracking project timelines, tracking your team’s hours, some of my favorite collaborative tools and software programs are:
1. For communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams
2. For file sharing: Dropbox, Hightail, Google Drive
3. For tracking project timelines: Asana, Basecamp, Toggl Plan, Trello
4. For tracking your team’s hours: Timely, TimeCamp
Impact:
A project manager influences most of the decisions in the project. A good project manager binds all the stakeholders and builds strong relationships with transparent and honest communication. Even if the deliverables are not met exactly as the client envisioned, you end up building lasting and trustworthy professional relations and a network for a lifetime.
Do plan fully:
It is merely impossible to predict the future, however as a good project manager, you should be aware of the expected dilemmas, risks, and challenges.
Uncontrolled growth or constant changes in the project’s scope is referred to as ‘scope creep’ in project management. This may occur at any point after the project initiates. It happens when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled.
As a result, to be a proactive project manager, you need to possess exceptional critical thinking capabilities and make wise decisions in order to solve problems. You should have a sound technical understanding to define the project scope and tackle the changes associated with the project lifecycle.
Impact:
Project uncertainty is inevitable. What you can do is prepare yourself, considering that scope creep can occur at any time. As a strong project manager, if you have a holistic mindset and determine your project goals through a systematic process and keep documentation of everything, you are in a safe place. It can help to carry out project planning properly and complete the project timely.
Do understand your responsibility:
It is thrilling to take the charge and be a boss. When you get in the role, you take the lead and think that you are in an authoritative position and get things done usually your own way. Unfortunately, such a thought process is wrong.
In a leading position, you need to realize your role. It becomes your job to schedule and attend daily standups, sprint planning, retrospective sprint meetings, and retrospective project meetings. You can get your hands to Mike Cohn’s Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum. Here he has given powerful tips and real-world case studies explaining how organizations make Scrum and agile work.
Therefore, it is your task to keep the team intact on one page. Be it a backend developer or frontend member in your team, or the customer’s side — it is your job to ensure alignment between all.
Impact:
IT is a complex industry. When dealing with IT projects, as a project manager you have to be on your toes all time. It is crucial to comprehend your role in a way that support your internal team members as well as the external stakeholders. The role takes on a diverse position when you realize the big picture role. Usually, when there is a problem, every individual has a different approach to tackle the same problem and at different times, it lifts team spirits when you inspect and bridge that loophole.
The DONT’S of Project Management in IT:
Don’t neglect risk(s):
Inadequate risk management can produce a disastrous outcome. It is true that you can’t predict the future and expect everything to go exactly like the plan. Think of a situation where the software development team is facing roadblocks and the current team is having trouble fixing the issue. Now, you need to clear impediments for your team. You need to find a way out by raising an immediate requirement for hiring software developers or maybe through outsourcing. For which you need to make decisions based on cost-effectiveness and time consumption.
Disasters:
- Performance is hit under stress.
- The project objective is not met.
- Time, quality, effort, and cost invested in the project are wasted.
- The bad reputation of the company.
How to Overcome:
Prepare a contingency plan. It is good to have a backup plan of action if things don’t go as planned.
Ensure proper documentation of the previous failed projects and even the successful ones, to anticipate the shortcomings in the current project. You can have a rough idea about the problems that can be encountered and prepare for the possible solutions beforehand.
As a result, you will not panic if anything goes wrong and be mentally prepared. This will also minimize wasting time and hard work put into the project.
Don’t overrule:
In a front-line position, you often tend to govern your team so much that you surpass them in the decision-making process. It is undoubtedly true that the decisions of the project manager influence most of the decisions in a project. However, you need to find a balance when it comes to choosing between autocratic or democratic leaders.
Disasters:
- The team collaboration is affected.
- The job becomes difficult.
- Personal autonomy takes over.
How to Overcome:
Project managers need to understand how their attitude can determine the project's success. It is not only a single project but a chain of projects that get affected in the long term.
Don’t miss to schedule kick-off meetings or daily standups:
If you underestimate the importance of kick-off meetings, you are already one step behind even before the project lifecycle begins. This meeting is essential as it provides a definition of the base elements for the project and other project planning activities.
Disasters:
- Communication and engagement barrier.
- Lack of transparency.
- A project manager and/or the team miss out on understanding why are they doing the project in the first place.
- Disrupts the common project goal.
How to Overcome:
When a project initiates, it should be indispensable to carry out daily standups or kick-off meetings. This can set the theme of the overall task(s) to be done in the daytime, what issues to be fixed, what work can be completed in an incremental fashion through sprints so that errors are fixed right away. It can also provide a platform for open communication from both internal and external ends and keep everyone on the same page. If you have bad news to tell, so speak about it as it is the right time to revise the strategy, restore the scope, time, cost, and quality constraints if required.
The bottom line is that there is no magic formula for successful project management or tools that can make every IT project successful. It is a blend of trials and errors. You need to be smart and use the tips at your disposal to cut down on time, quality, and cost constraints.
Whether you work with Jamboard in Google Drive or make use of advanced task management tools such as Trello, it truly doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are proactive; you know the do’s and don’ts, and then implement any approach to can make it easy and simple for you to get the desired results.
Therefore, to make the project successfully within the set timeframe and budget, if you can’t do it all alone, you don’t need to worry. Psmorfia’s project managers would love to help you in the process and make your project complete and successful as per your requirements.
Reach us to get more information and help you make your project a success.
