Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Design

Quick-Kill Project Management


Andrew and Jennifer are the authors of Applied Software Project Management (O'Reilly & Associates). They can be contacted at www.stellman-greene.com.


Say you're the lead developer on a small, five-person team. You've been working for weeks on a project, and the team is just starting to jell. Your team members range in experience from a senior architect to a junior programmer just out of school. Then your boss calls you in and tells you the senior vice president was just on the phone chewing him out, and he wants your project done yesterday. As it turns out, this project is highly visible and had been promised for a long time. The users have a job to do, and this software is vital. If it doesn't work, and work well, then you'd better update your résumé.

The last time you were on a team in this kind of high-pressure situation, the project was a nightmare. Team members went down false paths for days at a time and you had to play the hero, jumping in and working 40-hour weekends to fix serious design problems. There were interminable meetings with senior managers, stubborn bugs that never seemed to go away, and too many late nights of coffee and pizza. And when the team finally delivered something, users hated it. It seemed like every button they pressed had a bug, and entire features that they were expecting never materialized in the software.

The Quick Kill

Many teams find themselves in situations like this every day, and a lead developer faces serious challenges. He doesn't necessarily directly manage his team, but he's responsible for getting the software out the door. He does have the team's respect, and when he makes a decision, people will generally follow him. But the lead developer's job isn't management—it's development. He needs to spend most of his time designing the solution, designing the software, and building the code.

Ideally, project management takes either a dedicated project manager or a lot of the project lead's time. But what do you do if you're leading a team, and you have neither the time nor the budget to do project management "right"? It's difficult for someone in this position to even know where to start. That's the idea behind "quick kill"—a highly directed system aimed at "killing" only the most pressing project problems. In other words, these practices give project leads a good trade-off that yields the most gain for the least effort.

Quick-kill project management consists of three techniques that leads can use to help their project produce what the boss expects and users need:

  • Vision and scope document
  • Work breakdown structure
  • Code review

Each of these techniques takes little time to implement, and helps the team avoid some of the most common and costly project pitfalls. Using them, leads can vastly improve the odds of delivering acceptable software.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.