Project Recovery (Part 1)

 

If you're managing larger software development projects, bookmark this page immediately. I'm sure you'll refer to it at some point in your career.

Imagine the following scenario. For whatever reason, you suddenly find yourself managing a project that's already in progress. After meeting with the various stakeholders, you realize that the project is in trouble--serious trouble. I'm not talking about a slight schedule slip or a few critical bugs that were discovered late in the development cycle. I'm talking about a project that's so out of control it's on the verge of being cancelled.

If you're a larger software development company, this means you've spent millions of dollars on a project that will never bring in revenue. If you're a start-up, it means you're going to run out of cash before your only product becomes available to the marketplace.

What now? You must take a strong corrective action and follow these five steps.

Step 1: Eliminate the Obvious Problems
There are always evident reasons why a project is running late. If you want to find out the true nature of the setback, don't ask senior executives; ask the people who are responsible for the schedule slip. Senior developers who have an excellent track record for being on time represent a great starting place for identifying problems. Other developers who tend to be consistently late and defensive about…

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