Due to the different situations of different enterprises, this article only describes the stress risks that are easily overlooked by managers in project management so that managers can pay attention to them, and does not discuss specific methods to solve the risks.
In project management work, project managers need to face risks from all aspects, and the results of risk control directly determine the success or failure of the project. Among them, the risks brought by pressure are often the most easily ignored by managers, and the risk of pressure is very important to the project and the project. Teams bring risks that managers are reluctant to take.
1. Customer pressure
Customer pressure is the first problem for project managers in project development. Business personnel often do not or rarely discuss progress and technical details with project managers in business activities. The delivery time of project contracts is often based on customer requirements. It is decided that the beautiful vision described by the business person to the customer makes the customer's product function exceed expectations, and the project manager will face unreasonable time schedule and functional details that may not be realized when accepting the project task.
As the delivery date of the project draws nearer, the client's concern about the project progress is becoming more and more urgent. In most cases, the client's level of concern for the project also causes the top management of the company to directly exert political pressure on the project team.
2. Political pressure
The top management of the company is often not a technical background, lacks the necessary understanding of the standardized R&D process or only understands some relevant theories, and the R&D personnel or technical managers cannot prove the direct harm and consequences of simplifying the necessary process to the project. ; In order to deliver project results to users ahead of time or on time, senior managers often cut down processes without knowing enough about some necessary processes and blindly trusting the ability of employees, and wisely think that the progress pressure brought by this will affect all project members. Create a positive atmosphere to improve work quality, reduce project time, and deliver project products on time or even ahead of schedule.
In order to meet the unreasonable project delivery time, technical managers often cut down all non-development processes (including key processes such as requirements research, requirements analysis, interface design, detailed design, unit testing, integration testing, etc.) and The key meeting enables team members to enter the development stage in advance to obtain more research and development time. The research and development personnel have to abandon the development specification in order to quickly complete the requirements and deliver the product on time. The technical manager cannot effectively monitor the work quality of the research and development personnel. The quality of the products produced in such an environment can be imagined.
Poor product quality will firstly bring customers an extremely bad experience. When customers continue to discover bugs, their trust in the company will also decrease. If such products continue to be provided, they will eventually lose users; for the company , poor product quality also means a lot of after-sales maintenance work. If the product quality is not controlled during the research and development process, the high maintenance cost will grab all the profits obtained in the early stage of the project; for the team, any R&D personnel They are not willing to maintain projects with missing documents, messy code structure, and unintelligible comments. Long-term participation in a large number of after-sales maintenance work will also seriously affect the stability of the R&D team, and the resulting personnel flow will also improve team training. cost.
3. Progress pressure
Under normal circumstances, as a technical manager, at the beginning of the project, the project development schedule will be set according to the actual situation of the project. It depends on factors such as previous project experience; but in reality, communication work often takes up a lot of time due to the lack of detailed requirements analysis and detailed design work in the early stage; in the case of insufficient time, "overtime" seems to be only a project The only option for managers to complete their goals on time is that software development is a mental labor rather than a physical labor. The R&D personnel need better rest to keep their minds awake and put into the R&D work. Blind overtime can only produce products with many bugs. ; However, if the delivery time that cannot be completed is set at the beginning of the project, then no matter how much overtime work, the project will not be completed on time and with high quality. In this case, as a project manager, you have to face the fact that "overtime" is only It's just a matter of making team members look and feel better when a project fails.
4. Payback pressure
As R&D personnel, in the eyes of relatives and friends, they should sit in a clean and tidy office, do decent work, and enjoy generous salaries, but the vast majority of R&D personnel work in a noisy and harsh working environment with an average of more than The 12-hour working hours are exchanged for a meager salary, and the great deviation between ideal and reality makes them bear huge psychological pressure; the endless overtime work slowly erodes their last trace of patience, and in the case of meager or even no return The only option for R&D personnel seems to be job-hopping, which is also the main reason for the frequent turnover of IT industry personnel. In addition to increasing the burden on enterprises (overtime will be discussed separately in a separate article), overtime will not bring benefits to enterprises. any benefit.
5. Change pressure
Demand change management is the most common and important management work in project management. Facing the never-ending demand changes of customers, as an excellent project manager, in addition to accurately understanding customer needs in the early stage of the project, it is also necessary to Carry out demand version control and demand change management in the whole cycle, so as to summarize the time required for demand changes, and inform customers of the delayed delivery time due to demand changes and the R&D cost that the company needs to pay; however, in projects with frequent demand changes, the project Managers also need to pay attention to the resulting changes in team members' emotions. Repeatedly modifying the same module will make your subordinates gradually tire of their work and even doubt your ability. This emotion will eventually spread throughout your team. Until your team falls apart.
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