Managing and Planning for Critical tasks….
Again some common project management mistakes, which becomes critical and become root cause of the project failures. I am talking about not identifying and not pre-planning for Critical tasks.
The current project I am working on has a similar critical task of integrating VFP application with AS400 applications through use of MQ-series messaging. The development to send messages to MQ-series from within the VFP application has been implemented and tested successfully on the developers environment, at the time of UAT we have run into series of unidentified issues which have become critical, this could have been handled better by:
- Developing a small prototype application to check the AS400 integration requirement and check and identify the possible issues upfront (at the time of defining specifications)
- Selection of automated tool for the requirement
- Getting a AS400 consultant with the required integration experience
Failure in doing so always results in :
- Failing to deliver the project on time
- Cost going way over the estimated budget
- Not meeting the functional specification and hence lack of user satisfaction
- In some cases, project failure
The finance and administration department would definitely raise their eye brows for the cost involved in the above, but as a project manager I would be looking forward to the successful completion of the requirement rather than R & D at the UAT phase and Go-Live Phase.
Project Managers should be strong enough to identify and proactively handle the critical tasks, without being too much concerned about the cost factor.
The client and the developer should have better understanding and focus on resolving critical tasks rather than blaming each other on failure of critical tasks and the added costs.
March 17, 2007
· 
Rahul Desai · 
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Posted in: Project Management, Software Engineering, Talman news, Visual Foxpro
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