In the old days — as in a few decades ago — many people heard “project” and thought of something physical.
A house. A road. A dam. An unstable chair you built in your garage with your novice woodworking skills.
However, technology and the Internet have grown more prominent in our lives with each passing year. It seems like everyone has a computer, tablet, or smartphone — and, often, all 3.
Combine that with the prevalence of tech startups, and software and IT projects are taking over the project management space.
Many project management concepts apply to the software industry just as they do to marketing, sales, or PR, but software projects face unique challenges as well.
In this article, you’ll learn exactly what makes managing software projects different, and what challenges these differences pose to managers and teams. You’ll also get an overview of the most popular management methodologies and see how staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can help project managers in this field.
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What makes software project management different?
Software projects do have similarities with other types of projects. For example, they all have the same constraints (factors that restrict what the team can do, like project budget and timeline).
But there are some key differences:
- Invisibility/Intangibility: unlike physical products, software projects aren’t visible. This means that the customer — and many stakeholders — can’t see project progress unless they deeply understand the underlying code and other technical elements.
- Uncertainty: it’s difficult to define a software project’s specific requirements compared to other types of projects.
- Vagueness of the end state: it may be harder to imagine what a final piece of software should look like (relative to something such as a bridge).
- Resource availability: software capability is often more limited than resources in other types of projects, as it tends to require a high-level of knowledge, experience, and skill.
- Complexity: software development is extremely iterative, but also personal. One person working on something can have a very different approach from another person working on that same thing. This makes it very complex from an oversight standpoint.
- Cost structure: the costs involved in software development are mostly labor, due to needing software developers and other relevant employees. Whereas materials take up more of the spotlight in other kinds of projects.
- Rapidly-changing market: software development relies on having cutting edge technology. Rapid obsolescence of current tech significantly affects software projects.
All of these differences pose unique challenges that project managers in other industries don’t often face. We’ll explore these challenges next.
What challenges do software project managers face?
Many of the circumstances a software project manager faces are due to software being more ephemeral and the tasks required more complex.Here are some problems that project teams in the software industry often have to wrestle with:
- Stakeholders (customers, CEOs, other teams, etc.) can’t see your project’s progress unless they understand the underlying code and technical elements. With no visible progress, they may grow dissatisfied or anxious about when the product will be done.
- It can be hard to define detailed software product requirements or approximate the complexity of the project in advance.
- The logical nature of software development necessitates high collaboration and communication among teams. That said, simply adding more people won’t do much, and can actually slow progress.
- The labor-heavy cost structure makes hiring the right people all the more important. Making it more crucial to have highly skilled and collaborative team members. But those highly-skilled team members are also very expensive (often more so than other team members within a marketing or sales project). This makes time management all the more important.
- Keeping up with industry changes is challenging. Software companies run the risk of a technology they rely on — or even the product they’re developing — becoming obsolete.
Thanks to these — and other — obstacles, some 45% of IT projects run over budget and 7% run over time across most industries on average.
What are the best project management methodologies for software projects?
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
SDLC is the traditional approach to managing the software development process. Although its popularity is fading, many companies still use it when creating new software products.
SDLC consists of 5 phases.
- Requirement analysis/gathering. The team gathers input from all stakeholders to lock down the customer needs.
- Planning. The team reviews all requirements, then estimates costs and resources they’ll need to deliver the product. Additionally, they’ll evaluate risk and brainstorm ways to mitigate those risks.
- Software design. The team uses the project requirements to design the software. They hand off the design plan for stakeholders to review and give input on.
- Software development. Finally, the team begins creating the software. Everyone should stick to the plan.
- Testing. Before the team sends the finished project to the customer, they test for deficiencies to fix and bugs to squash. The team tests until the project meets the requirements created in the first stage.
- Deployment. Software is deployed to the production environment. In many cases, the team may let stakeholders use software in a testing deployment environment first to make sure the team doesn’t miss any final bugs.
Such defined steps offer structure to each software developer. At the same time, there is room for stakeholder feedback at multiple stages, such as requirements gathering and design approval.This helps align the customer’s wants with the final product.
The biggest drawback of this approach is that it tends to be slow. If the team is developing a big piece of software it could take months. Only to discover when it goes to testing that there are significant bugs or defects forcing the team to go back to the drawing board.
When compared to our next 2 approaches, there’s also a higher risk of the software becoming obsolete before it goes live and the customer not feeling like what they got is what they wanted.
Agile
Agile was formally introduced in 2001 to address failures of the old Waterfall methodology (which SDLC is modeled around). It’s worked pretty well — in 2017, PwC found that Agile projects are 28% more successful than projects under Waterfall.
Agile is an iterative methodology, meaning you don’t knock out all your planning at the beginning. Instead, you plan a short sprint or iteration, execute it, review, and then plan the next one.
With Agile you start projects off with an overall product roadmap and high-level plan.
Under most Agile frameworks (more on this in a second), you only tackle detailed planning for the immediate 1–4 week sprint. Then, based on how that sprint goes, you review, adjust, and plan the next one.
Such a structure — or lack thereof — brings about plenty of upsides.
- It’s flexible and quick. Industries evolve. Customers change their minds. Agile allows for quick response to these shifts.
- There’s more stakeholder feedback. The project team gets feedback from the customer regularly, allowing for constant fine-tuning. This is especially important in software, since the customer can’t tangibly see the results until the product is complete.
- It works well with uncertain end goals. Software products aren’t as easy to define in their end state, making a flexible methodology like Agile helpful.
- It fosters collaboration. Agile’s unstructured nature makes collaboration between teams and team members much more important. As a result, you create a more cohesive organization.
Now, Agile is often considered a broad project management philosophy. Within it are several frameworks that follow Agile thought, the most popular being Scrum.
Scrum focuses on delivering max value in minimum time. It involves short “sprints” where the team delivers bits or versions of the product regularly.
During sprints, teams have daily stand-up meetings that are exactly what they sound like. Teams stand in a circle and quickly discuss what’s happened in the last 24 hours, what they’re going to tackle in the next 24 hours, and what roadblocks they’re facing.
Once a sprint ends, the team delivers a product “increment” or version for customer review, discusses what changes need to be made, and launches into planning the next sprint.
Hybrid
Although Agile works for many teams in the software industry, some team members get uncomfortable with the lack of structure. Especially on larger, cross-department projects.
So why not mix the strengths of Waterfall in with the flexibility of Agile?
Well, that’s what the hybrid approach is for. It’s a merger of the two. Exactly which bits of what methodology you take will depend on your team, customer, and business needs.
But a common hybrid approach is to start with Waterfall. In the beginning of a hybrid project, the team plans. They gather and analyze all the project requirements before they begin the work.
Once the project kicks off, they switch to Agile and tackle design, development, and testing in short cycles.
To learn more about the different project methodologies, check out our complete guide.
How staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can help your dev team manage software projects
Every software company is different, even if they face the same broad industry challenges. Fortunately, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud is a powerful project management app that can help your dev team manage complex projects, whether you use SDLC, Agile, or Hybrid.
Just read this case study to see how the NHL — who uses Scrum — was able to manage its sprints much more easily with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s project planning and work management capabilities when it was developing its custom applications. The IT dev team gained much more transparency into app development progress.
You could manage your team’s sprints as well with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s sprint planning template.
The NHL’s IT dev team didn’t stop at using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud for easier sprints, though. It moved many of its custom apps to staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, saving an untold amount of time on its workflows.
Agile project management not your thing? Our project management software also has templates that will work for Waterfall or hybrid approaches. Plus a handy bug tracker template for managing your testing, no matter what approach you take.
Conclusion
Software project management is the — relatively — new kid on the project management block, creating plenty of unique challenges that managers in the industry must face.
Most of them have to do with the fact that you can’t “see” or “touch” software. Computer code is a lot different than brick and concrete.
Fortunately, methodologies like Agile — and its sub-methodologies like Scrum — can save the day.
They’re much more, erm, agile, allowing teams to adapt to changes and continuously deliver value to the end-user.
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