The Essential Practices for Project Management Success
These 20 practices can help make any project more successful and less painful.
Managing software projects is challenging under the best circumstances. The team must balance competing stakeholder interests against the constraints of limited resources and time, ever-changing technologies, and unachievable demands from unreasonable people. Project management involves managing people, technologies, risks, requirements, expectations, suppliers, and more. It’s a juggling act with many balls in the air at once.
Here are 20 practices that I’ve found contribute strongly to project management success. They apply whether the “project” you’re thinking about is a single development iteration, a product release, or an entire development initiative. You might dismiss these practices as “traditional project management” and therefore not relevant to your agile project. Not so. An agile team still needs to perform these activities (albeit sometimes by different names), but iteratively and incrementally, such as conducting iteration retrospectives, not just an overall project retrospective.
I’ve organized the twenty practices into five categories:
- Laying the groundwork
- Planning the project
