Project Management - Tips For Helping You Adopt A Process

The Rational Unified Process, Enterprise Unified Process, Agile Development Methodologies, Unified Modeling Languages. They come in many names, complexities and sizes but following one will help ensure success on your next project.

This article is not a detailed overview of a formal process. Instead it provides an overview of the most critical components common to each, as well as some tips on successfully deploying them. Although many process descriptions do an excellent job of breaking down the various components of the process they rarely cover areas like how this affects your team, how much process to use or offer practical advice on issues encountered in the real world when trying to deploy one.

It can be very helpful as a beginner’s introduction to process and can help you more easily grasp some of the concepts you will be introduced to. For the more experienced process guru it should have some helpful tips on smoothing over some of the rough edges we all deal with from time to time.

The information here is based on experiences and lessons learned in over 15 years of developing and managing over 100 complex project releases.
Following these fundamentals will improve your chances of success in any process you adopt and provide a solid foundation for maturing it.

What’s a Process and why do I need one?Regardless of what business we are in, software, web site design or retail clothing, we all have a process we follow to complete a given project. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not, often with costly results. When we talk about adopting a process we are talking about a more formal process. A process is essentially an integrated set of roles, methods and techniques to in part, help achieve the following:
Minimize risk.

More accurately estimate your project schedule and budget.
Detect problems early (upstream) instead of later (downstream) when they are much more expensive to fix, if they can be fixed at all.

Better communication among team members regarding project scope, requirements and status.
More accurately track the progress of the project and detect slippage early.
Accomplish the project’s goals as efficiently and cost effectively as possible.

Formal processes are often created and refined over years of trial and error to attempt to create an ideal “recipe” for having an optimal chance at successfully completing any project.

While they were developed for and commonly used in Software Development, Aerospace and engineering, most of the core concepts are not specific to these or any industry and anyone can benefit from using them.