Techn@gerial

There are many things in life, day to day, that we take for granted; especially in the developed world. Clean water, available energy, medicine, longevity, the list is enormous. However, when one of these "certainties" is disrupted, for whatever reason, the impact can be quite disastrous. On the whole, disruption to these mostly (seemingly)mundane amenities is quite rare, but to those that are impacted, see New Orleans storm refugees, Gloucestershire flood victims and New Yorkers during their prolonged power outage, these outages of normal function are extraordinarily disabling.

On a more personal level, the day to day can be thrown into disarray by a mere or inch of snow or a flat car battery. Depending on your personal circumstances, the things you take for granted are only really evident when they are momentarily, or sometimes permanently lost. Clearly a software project lesson is upon us…

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Product and service roadmaps are notoriously hot topics in most software or technology businesses.  They are there to represent the aspirations and communicable plans a business wants to surface and use to keep their customers and partners engaged.  There is no doubt that they are an essential aspect of demonstrating and evaluating your delivery capability but getting them right and keeping them meaningful is a challenge.

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I’ve never really used the project management templates in Visio until recently. I was looking for a non-MSProject tool to build a gantt chart and something more illustrative than just a spreadhseet. The Project Schedule template set contains an item called a Gantt Chart Frame. It prompts for the number of tasks and the default timescale for the chart. You can then fill in the blanks and even add milestones and dependencies. The output is pretty good.

So why not use MSProject? Well, this picture isn’t a project plan, so if you don’t want to legitimize what is a forecast or a “guess-timate” it may help illustrate your thinking.

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Why is it so difficult to accurately determine the path of any given software development project? What are the constituent aspects that create uncertainty and inject risk? Why do software development projects invariably end up exasperating senior management? Why do they slip?

Quite simply, software development projects are different to other projects. The mass of moving parts, different people, legacy support and integration and a whole range of other components and dependencies can be mind boggling.

Software is intrinsically complex. To the untrained eye, code and software architecture is quite literally like a foreign language. It can be learnt however, and some people have a natural aptitude for the work. But, as with any learnt skill, capability comes in degrees, people vary enormously and in this particular field of work, this variation makes a big difference when trying to plan for delivery. This article outlines some of these variables and how to prevent them being an issue.

Continue Reading » Software project entropy

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