Working with Developers
Many projects are mired by poor communication between a business group and its developers. Ensure that you have mechanisms in place that put you control of the process. Think about what makes a feature finished, and the mechanism for agreeing this with your developers. Failure to agree the finish line can cause:
- Poor relations with developers as deliverables they deem complete are held in sign-off limbo.
- Expensive delays as deliverables are held up by further meetings, documents and development.
To guard against these problems:
- With the developers, break the project down into discrete deliverables.
- If you are working with external developers, index payment to the completion of deliverables. Everyone then should feel some urgency about getting to 'yes'.
- If you have a long payment cycle, try to short circuit it for staged payments. The association between delivery and payment can be powerful psychological spur.
- Define sign off criteria for each deliverable. These acceptance tests needn't be complex. A quick descriptions of the actions a user should be able to take, and the responses he or she should expect from the system would be fine.
- Build a sign-off period into your time estimates. Even the best planned feature may require some changes.
Most of the points made here are obvious. And most of them are ignored most of the time. Concentrate on three things when you manage your project: plan, communicate and consolidate.
© bgz 2008
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testimonials:
Service They manage each brief on a personal, highly interactive level and in a very collaborative style.
Sue Powell, Marketing Consultant
Service They manage each brief on a personal, highly interactive level and in a very collaborative style.
Sue Powell, Marketing Consultant
training:
BGZ Courses We teach open source and open standard technologies. We aim to cover the detail of any topic we tackle, but also to reach beyond that to the principles that underlie the subject.
BGZ Courses We teach open source and open standard technologies. We aim to cover the detail of any topic we tackle, but also to reach beyond that to the principles that underlie the subject.
news:
Linux Magazine Article January's edition of Linux Magazine includes an article by BGZ's Matt Zandstra covering a new feature of PHP. The feature, a Reflection API, improves the Web scripting language's support for object-oriented programming.
Linux Magazine Article January's edition of Linux Magazine includes an article by BGZ's Matt Zandstra covering a new feature of PHP. The feature, a Reflection API, improves the Web scripting language's support for object-oriented programming.