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There are many other concepts and advisories you can use to increase the chance of success for your Visual Basic application. This list encapsulates the crux of these things. |
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Migrating to Project Auditing from Project Management |
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If you've developed software for any length of time for commercial, corporate, or nonprofit organizations, you might have worked under a project manager. The project manager traditionally is responsible for making sure that the software needed by the organization is delivered on time with no budget overruns. Of course, this scenario seldom occurs, especially without an organized methodology, but project managers are strictly tasked with making it happen. Unfortunately, this strategy often leads to excess stress and higher turnover among project personnel. You can perhaps name many other factors about traditional project management that had sometimes adversely impacted your development efforts. |
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A better approach might be to re-orient the role of the project manager. Let's face it, as mentioned earlier, technology changes rapidly, with Visual Basic being no exception in technological changes. Project managers today seldom get involved in the daily grunt work of software development. Instead of imposing a traditionalist software development process on today's developers, project managers should become more like project auditors. |
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A project auditor is like a project manager who audits the development process at certain realistic milestones to gauge whether progress is being made at an acceptable pace given the very high risks of successfully developing quality software. For all it's worth, I must admit that developing software is in some cases riskier than gambling in Las Vegas, and in some ways resembles the risk of highly speculative, wildcat oil drilling. |
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One way that modern oil companies have mitigated the risks of pouring huge amounts of money into drilling for oil in places where none exists is to budget a certain amount of money for exploration and research using the latest petroleum and geological research technology. Yes, it's a lot of money, but much of the oil industry learned that the money spent on analytical research has consistently proven to be far cheaper than blindly drilling for oil. |
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Similarly, software development project moneyholders should realistically budget some money for problem assessment and solution exploration by well-respected technical experts in order to come up with an intelligent estimate of the effort necessary to elaborate, construct, and deploy a product. For these three phases, the managers would then audit the project at predetermined milestones to see if progress is being made at a reasonable pace. If not, look for ways to improve the situation; if that doesn't help, simply shelve all of the knowledge gained for possible work later and give notice to the team |
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