Understanding Project Management
Understand the waterfall and agile project management approaches.
Project vs product management
“Are we there yet?”
On a family road trip, your parents may have quipped that it’s the journey, not the destination, that you should focus on. That’s not the case for your project manager.
It turns out there’s a lot of ways to answer that question. Software projects are notoriously hard to estimate, and the industry moves so fast that a product’s specification rarely stays the same for even a month—this is why many teams have given up on writing specifications. So, the answer to “Are we there yet?” is often something between “No” and “It depends on what your definition of there is.”
Project vs. product management
Many people confuse project and product management. They’re very different:
Project management is about scheduling and tracking. A project is a planned undertaking with a goal; it is something that exists in time with a distinct beginning and end.
Product management is about defining and marketing the things our company sells. It has nothing to do with the actual building of the product.
Our industry has put considerable effort into estimating software projects because there’s a lot of money at stake: the company makes a gamble on each project, estimating how much money it’ll make vs. how much money it costs. When the project schedule blows up, the company’s cost blows up as well. Plus, there’s the cost of lost business. Plus, the opportunity cost to not invest in other projects… you get the idea.
The project manager’s job is to plan and execute ...