Project Management - Thinking It Through

This week's readings were all about project management. I've actually participated in a number of fairly complicated projects and none of them were professionally managed. It would be interesting to talk with a professional project manager to see what they would have to say about how we did. I do know that we did a good job and even won some awards. Still, there were problems and I wonder how much smoother it might have gone if we had the benefit of professional project management.

To my surprise, I was really interested in the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) Process Model v. 3.1 White Paper (see www.microsoft.com/msf). I guess the reason I found it interesting is that it uses Milestones in a sort of spiral or iterative process. Microsoft compares it to combining the traditional Waterfall management technique with the Spiral model. This is pretty much the way we managed the CD-ROM project I worked on "Photography Workshop Sponsored by Canon." Of course the Microsoft Process is much more detailed and has to address projects of leviathan scale compared to the $400K or so we spent on developing Photography Workshop (a really good budget and we spent it wisely - the product still receives good reviews even though it is not being distributed commercially these days).

Microsoft's Project Tradeoff Matrix is also a useful way to adjust everyone's expectations about how to make decisions about the balance between Resources, Schedule and Features. It reminds me of the sign I have seen behind the counter at a number of auto shops: Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any Two. At least in the photography business, it has been difficult to get clients to buy into that paradigm; they want it all.

I didn't mean to only talk about the Microsoft Process, but I also found the concepts of Bug Convergence (the point at which bugs start to go down instead of up) and Zero Bug Bounce (when development catches up with testing and there are no bugs - perhaps this is more of a concept than reality???) to be interesting aspects of managing software and not something I had encountered thus far.

I should probably also mention a series of great articles that relate to digital library project management by H Frank Cervone for OCLC. He has a lot of great information presented in digestible form. I will definitely want to hang on to those PDFs for future reference in this area