Software Production Management

I’m now PM but I cannot forget my eight years of development experience. My PM metamorphosis take more than four years and even now I cannot leave my geekness behind.

I love programming, I love computers, I love tech details in my projects -and now I love my brand new iPhone toy -it is more a toy than a phone. Is it good to have such geekness running through my veins? The answer for me is: absolutely yes, I could not even imagine how to deal with the PM responsibilities of execution and monitoring and control of a process that I don’t understand or a deliverable that is not tangible product -like source code.

The awful truth of software development

Software development is a little bit frustrating. As developer I know that you probably could be the best coder ever, you can spend tons of hours coding the greatest application and that doesn’t mean success. Probably the project itself could be a success, you will met the scope, within the cost estimation and delivery time -something that I read in the books that is possible – but it doesn’t guarantee the product success. We all know that poor quality software products have the greatest success in the history, like DOS, Microsoft Windows, and JavaScript, while others like OS2, Opera Browser and probably many software projects fail or simple do not have the same impact.

So as PM I deal with this situation every day, tons hours spent in coding and delivery could disappear by typing rm -rf. But coders has to keep on their work, with the same passion and they have to feel that support from their bosses and project managers: their work is important, their work is needed, their work is appreciated.

Software success is attributed to great ideas of the managers, clients or sponsors but, the real thing is that between a sentence like I want something to write my documents and a software product like Writely -formerly known as Google Docs word processing tool, Microsoft Word, and even FCK Editor are a huge difference and a lot of code lines made by unknown heroes.

Keep your heroes motivated

Real geek coders have a need to learn and research about new technologies. There is no maybe for this affirmation. Coders have to move faster in a connected world with thousands of new development initiatives every day -you don’t ask for Cobol -dear Cobolito- programmers these days for new projects, right?

As PM you have to understand it and keep a level of challenge as part of your software project -no the case of all the projects but you should try it at least on a few set of them. R&D is vital to keep coders motivated, and it could be part of your project -increasing the risk of failure on an unproven or not dominated technology, could be part of your company strategy -reducing the overall company revenue, will for sure, raise the team motivation and dedication and will keep the company innovation in a healthy cycle need for competitiveness.

Do not feel scary about innovation, it costs but it is needed. If you don’t believe me ask the Google guys abut innovation and check their company spirit. It is impossible to have a Google model everywhere but you should take a look to the other paradigm.

Let’s start talking software tools. Probably, if you work in a big company or an projectized one you will have an enterprise solution like Microsoft Project, Primavera, or Clarity. However there is a lot of small / medium and even big companies without any software tool.

This is the first of a set of posts when I will present how I start my projects when no software support is available. Of course I suppose you will have little help of the IT department to get at least some free/usable servers for your purposes. This one will present a small but useful list of tools and their licenses.

You will find a lot of tools that could make easier your life, but obviously, the success of any software tool is based on the use we gave it. Below you will find a list of project management software tools that I recommend for small/medium projects, all of them are free or open source projects

• OpenProj
  • CPAL
• GanttProject
  • GPL (almost all)
• Open Workbench
  • MPL/Proprietary
• Clockingit
  • MIT/X11
• B-kin Project Monitor
  • Spanish version only
  • Propietary
• Dotproject
  • GPL
  • Documentation site

I think is good enough for now, I don’t want to make expectations about those projects, all of them have their pros/cons. If you have comments, feel free to submit them. The whole idea is to build a knowledge base for those who are starting to use a software tool or are evaluating its use.

We all know that Microsoft products are not the bests in the market -except for the all might Microsoft Excel. But when we decided to move from Microsoft Project 2003 to Microsoft Project 2007 we were not aware of the big problems we will face in the near future.

We all were more than happy with the Microsoft Project Server 2003 -this is a great product, not the best but a great product, I will not blame on Microsoft products. So when 2007 version came out we evaluate the migration and take the fatal decision: UPGRADE

I hope Microsoft refund the company I work for, not only with the product value but also assuming the additional costs we incurred when started using it. We even set a SWAT team inside the company to address the software defects -WOW, could you imagine a SWAT MS Word team in your company to address MS Word defects?

These are the kind of defects we found:

• There is no ability to add persons to a tasks when people already submit their time -i.e. if somebody is included during the task execution you will have to create a new one for the same purpose.
• Do not put blank lines in your project plan -What? Are evil blank lines?

There are more issues that you could even imagine but, I doesn’t make any sense to write them all, probably you will need years to read them all . When you and your team are forced to log their time more than one time (yes we do that every day for every work day of the year) because of PS issues you will see how many defects this product has and will pray to the software gods for solutions.

Probably you remember the great launches of the Microsoft products that demonstrates that they usually promoted/release products without concerns about the quality. Did you remember the Windows Millenium Edition (a.k.a Windows Me)? Probably you don’t. Try to reach it from the Microsoft site, try to even get support, it was deleted from our minds. Probably Microsoft will do the same with PS 2007, so copy this entry in your computers so they will not be able to erase your knowledge.

I’m pretty sure the Microsoft PS team will have a better/decent product in the future but BY THE DATE OF THIS ENTRY PUBLICATION, I will encourage people to not use Microsoft Project Server 2007 -or at least try it before buy it -and when I said try it I really mean it.

LEGAL NOTICE: This is my personal appreciation of the product and DO NOT represent the legal company position. This entry is not related to the company I work for in any way. I’m writing it because I feel frustrated about the poor product as final user and I hope somebody found this entry it useful. BTW, What does PS means? Project Server or Problems Served.