While clearing my mailbox of all sorts of things (well, I don’t like it when it’s not empty!), I discovered an interesting document –21 Project Management Practices from the respected Karl Wiggers.

Now – open this 9-page document and read, enjoying the brevity and clarity of each sentence. I’ll wait!🙂

Have you read it? So you know that the project is just five circles:

Now let’s reason. Look at these circles to see if you clearly understand their contents and purpose. Perhaps the outer circles will begin to lose their meaning in your eyes – in fact, we need to work, and not grind something out or admire corporate bullshit:

If everything is fine, you clearly understand the meaning of each of the five circles and cover them in your professional activities – everything is fine, the success of your project is guaranteed, you don’t have to read further. I won’t distract you any further!🙂

However, let’s say you are an ordinary developer in an ordinary offshore company, no matter where it is located and no matter what it is developing on. Then perhaps your project will look like this:

What does it mean? Somewhere there is a customer, somewhere something is written about the project as a whole and deadlines. You (or not you, but one of the developers) were probably asked about estimating deadlines (but they might not have been asked). Now a manager comes up to you every day, asking how you are doing… and that’s basically all, there’s nothing else in the project, it will somehow end, then somehow another one will begin. Have a beer in the evening, the weekend has long been planned, in general, life is good. AND THIS IS NORMAL!

Through the eyes of an ordinary project manager, you will most likely see something similar to this:

Here the picture of the world becomes wider, but, alas, does not cover the entire diversity of things and forces acting on the project:

• The goals and criteria for the success of the project for the customer do not mean at all what the contractor sees: fulfilling to the letter what was written in the technical specifications on time does not guarantee the business success of the project.
• Stakeholders that the manager may not even know exist can influence decisions about project financing.
• At a higher level, management decisions can be made based on formal project metrics.
• Collecting and using historical company data can be perceived as unnecessary and taking up valuable activity time.

Finally, this is what the customer may see:

Possible shortcomings at the project launch stage include incorrect identification of the project goal, market niche, intended users, and circle of stakeholders. Further, it is possible to underestimate the complexity of the project and, as a result, choose contractors who offered deliberately low estimates. Estimation of the actual labor costs on the project falls entirely on the shoulders of the contractors, as well as daily monitoring of the progress of the project. An unbiased assessment of the contractor at the end of the project and documented conclusions for the future are not always found.

How to make sure you always see the whole picture, and is this necessary? Yes, it is necessary, but not for everyone: it is important for developers to concentrate on their narrow tasks, because no one else can do their job! The project manager of the contractor organization, on the contrary, needs to see everything: then he will be able to correctly make the necessary management decisions. It is also desirable for the customer to see the whole picture of the project: this is the basis for building long-term trusting relationships with the contractor and allows you to focus on business goals.

Interesting in this regard is the formation of joint ventures between the contractor and the customer, when technical expertise successfully complements business knowledge in a certain domain. This model works successfully, while “traditional” outsourcing is inevitably doomed to mutual misunderstanding.

And finally, let everything be like this in your projects: