In order to help improve the competitiveness of Chinese software companies as a whole, recently, the National Research Institute project management experts with rich practical experience organized by the National Research Institute Project Management Experts conducted systematic software project management training for several well-known domestic software companies. These trainings are all customized services. Therefore, in the process of research, it is found that domestic software companies have many misunderstandings in project management. Guoyan Lecture Hall would like to share our insights with the media and the majority of software companies and practitioners:
Myth #1: Customers don’t need to be fully involved.
Many software companies believe that customer participation is mainly in three things: agreement signing and demand research, customer demand change and project acceptance signing. As a result, companies often find that customers are severely delaying acceptance, and that a large number of customer requirements change during the acceptance period, causing serious delays in the progress of the project. Often a project that is expected to be profitable ends up being overwhelmed.
Guoyan Lecture Hall believes that an important reason for this is that the customer did not participate in the whole process of the project. For example, the start-up meeting in the early stage of the project, the informed system of all stakeholders in the project process, the weekly work meeting, and the summary of the project's phased work all require customer participation and feedback. Otherwise, when the company submits an extremely large and complex final plan a year later, the client will not understand the process of your plan at all, who will dare to sign and accept it? The customer can only spend a few months to completely "dismember" the entire solution. In the end, of course, a lot of problems need to be improved, and the company can only spend a few more months to revise it. . . . . .
Misunderstanding 2: The role of the project manager.
In domestic software companies, project managers are mostly technical backbones whose main task is technology development. As project managers, they are naturally responsible for the development of the most important aspects of the project.
The above role positioning can easily cause two problems: communication problems between the project team, market personnel and customers; the project manager has done a good job in his own development work, but neglected the management of the entire project.
Project management experts in the National Research Institute Lecture Hall believe that 50-80% of a project manager's time is project planning, resource coordination and communication management. The project manager must grasp the overall situation of the project, and actively communicate directly and actively on behalf of the project development team with market personnel and customers, understand the real needs of the project, adjust the design plan in time, and avoid risks. At the same time, because the project manager has to deal with emergencies and some things that are not subject to subjective control, the key links on the critical path of the project should be taken care of by other members of the project team rather than the project manager, so as to avoid affecting the overall situation because of themselves.
Misunderstanding 3: The quality improvement of the project depends on the perfect quality testing system.
Many companies position software testing to improve the quality of software development projects. Project management experts from the National Research Institute think that the quality testing system is only a remedial measure to pick out bugs caused by various factors, but it cannot avoid the emergence of new bugs.
Really effective quality management is a whole-process quality management plan based on a set of quality assurance system. The standardized management of each link is a basis for quality assurance. In addition, a standardized project plan review system is also a must for quality assurance. Preparation steps, often the customer's evaluation of the quality first is the pros and cons of the program quality. An effective and scientific testing system will also help to find problems in the design before submitting to the client.
In addition to the above problems, customers have problems of one kind or another in many fields such as process management, document management, and risk management. The expert teams of Guoyan Consulting and Guoyan Lecture Hall will successively share with you the problems in the field of project management.