Floris

As the technologies grew much more sophisticated (eg disks, larger memories and compilers) so the systems we created became a lot extra complex. As the IT market grew, so did ...

Info Technology, and the development of enterprise laptop or computer systems, is reasonably new, by which I imply much less than 50 years old. I began in this business in the early 1960s and was involved in the replacement of punched card tabulator systems with punched card personal computer systems (such as IBM 1400s).

As the technologies grew extra sophisticated (eg disks, bigger memories and compilers) so the systems we developed became considerably a great deal more complex. As the IT industry grew, so did the numbers of programmers, analysts and operators working inside it.

These were mainly highly bright people today, skilled and inventive but with more often than not tiny appreciation of the wants of home business. The wheel would be reinvented numerous occasions in a large number of numerous strategies and there were as a number of diverse methods of structuring pc programmes as there had been programmers carrying out it!

austin project management

It was out of this that method development methodologies arose. These early methodologies had been usually created by the main hardware manufacturers and management consultancies and had been intended to be templates for development. Some had been high quality, some have been truly awful. Some had been concise and some, like SSADM, had been massively overblown and became the tail wagging the dog. Inevitably, the overblown ones became adopted by governments all over the planet, adding massively to the cost and timescales of IT development in the 1980s with no substantially improving all round high-quality.

The advent of databases (relational, hierarchical, etc) added to the complexity and created ever larger development projects the order of the day. This was partly the trigger for the emergence of project management methodologies simply because IT project management was frequently assigned to systems analysts and programmers with huge technological expertise but tiny in the way of organisational skills.

The management consultancies swiftly saw industrial possibilities and we saw a plethora of proprietary project management methodologies but it was the UK governments CCTA which broke the mould and launched PROMPT an practically workable methodology for IT project management. This was developed, firstly, into PRINCE and then into PRINCE2, which is fine and has turn out to be widely adopted.

It is not unreasonable to regard PRINCE2 as the benchmark for project management methodologies and it does, indeed, deliver a route map. I use it routinely in most of my projects, but it begs the question:

Does making use of a fine methodology make me a superior project manager?

It certainly aids but project management is alot more than just the mechanics of the approach. It is about interpersonal expertise, stakeholder awareness, presentation to management and understanding your guidelines for winning. In other words, it is a blend of theory and capabilities.

My eBook Project Capabilities looks at quite a few of the troubles involved and tries to meld theory with practical tips. You dont have to operate in the market for 30 years, but it oftentimes assists if you listen to somebody who has. Practical experience, awareness and normal sense will normally enable, regardless of the methodology you pick out for your project.