People are the primary driving factor in any project, but especially software development. Managers will often say this, but their actions will sometimes prove otherwise.
There are different roles that people will have, and they need to know what is expected of them, and be able to perform that task with the skill required. Unfortunately, putting two or three unskilled people in a task that one skilled person should be doing, rarely works.
Stakeholders
- Senior managers define the business issues. Often have a influence on the project.
- Project (technical) managers plan, motivate, organize, and control the practitioners who do software work.
- Practitioners deliver the technical skills that are necessary to engineer a product or application.
- Customers specify the requirements for the software.
- End users interact with the software once it is released to production.
Team Leaders
Helpful if they have technical skills, but more importantly, must have people skills to help lead their team.
- Motivation. The ability to encourage technical people to produce to their best ability.
- Organization. The ability to mold existing (or invent new) processes that enable the concept to be translated into a product.
- Ideas or innovation. The ability to encourage people to create and feel creative even when they must work within established bounds.
They need to be good at problem solving, so they can figure out who needs to go where in the development process, and get the problems that arise solved, even if they don’t solve the actual problem them self.
Software Development Team
The “best” team structure depends on the management style of your organization, the number of people who will populate the team and their skill levels, and the overall problem difficulty.
Agile teams, or any of the other team structures, can be used here. It’s best to use what works best for your company. There are many books written about different team structures, sometimes about a single type team structure, so I won’t go into them here, because that would be to do a disservice.
Regardless of the team structure, these will be the developers who will be working on the project to make sure it is completed.
Project Management – People was originally found on Access 2 Learn
