Project Management Consulting

What is the best way to manage a software project? There have been many techniques, but most of them were terrible. Those who trust in deities that control the fate of software projects place a lot of faith and hope in prayer and optimism. People without such confidence frequently rely on motivational methods like whipping, chains, boiling oil, and photos of individuals hiking mountains and seagulls flying over the sea. Unfortunately, most of these methods usually result in the same signs of software mismanagement: development teams that are always late despite working longer hours. Teams that create products with evident poor quality that do not meet the client's demands.

The Iron Cross

These methods fail so spectacularly because the people who employ them lack a fundamental understanding of software development's physics. The physics of software projects sets bounds on all projects, forcing them to make an unbreakable trade-off known as the Iron Cross of project management. Good, fast, cheap, done: Choose any three you like. You can't have the fourth one. You can have a good, quick, and affordable project, but it won't get done. You can create a cheap, fast, and finished project, but it will not be good.

In fact, a competent project manager knows that each of these qualities has a coefficient. A good leader ensures that a project is excellent enough, fast enough, inexpensive enough, and completed as much as required. The manager does not demand that all of these coefficients be 100%, but instead manages the terms on these dimensions. This is what Agile strives to accomplish. Agile is a framework that helps in executing such pragmatic project management.