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Whether you’re thinking of becoming a contract programmer, or looking for promotions within the information technology (IT) industry, project management training is essential for career advancement. Project management is the ability to make reasonable projections on man hours and work loads to keep your clients happy, and to keep the people working underneath you from burning out.
Aside from very small programs, most computer software is written by teams of programmers, with the project broken down into several phases, and the phases divided into smaller jobs to be done by programmers by specific deadlines. Even "free" software (like that generated by the Open Source community) uses this type of subdivision of labor.
The essence of getting any kind of large computer project done is planning and organization. Someone has to be "the boss", in charge of designating what has to be done and by whom and when. Someone has to be in charge of setting the deadlines, making sure that project component dates that are going to slip let the deadline manager know ahead of time that something is amiss, and making sure that appropriate infrastructure is set up early in the project, and that individual coders turn their work in on time. That skill is project management, and it’s one of the key, crucial mind sets of a successful executive in any field, not just computers. Think about running your business – you have to make sure that schedules are made, parts are bought in time to meet customer demand, that marketing information and press releases go out on time, that your web site is updated, and your scripts that manage the user experience are tested…all of these require strategic planning around set objectives, which is the essence of project management.
Project management takes many steps to go from the core idea to completed work. We’ll use an example from software development as the beginning. The phase one task resolution is building a set of parameters – what does the end user need? What does the customer want? How well does the customer’s stated wants and desires match with their intended usage patterns? In computer software development, it’s surprising, but a lot of customers cannot articulate what they want or need in an application – and in fact, many will become obstinate that some features need to be in place that will require hundreds to thousands of man-hours of coding time, but will be used seldom, if at all.
Once the user needs have been identified, the next phase is to figure out what needs to be done to meet user needs. Break the project down into small parts, and assign them to teams who are obligated to work together and share data. Give deadlines, and milestones that have to be met. Then, be sure that components get assembled, compiled and tested – and tested by people who weren’t part of the design process. Everyone’s dealt with buggy software at some point or another; in house software development requires quality assurance testing to make sure that as many of those problems are fixed before the software leaves the developers as is possible. No process for this is ever perfect, but failing to budget the time to do it is one of the critical management failures of software development.
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