Application Development: The Power of Foresight

Rajakumar is a Senior Consultant working in a reputed IT company. He has successfully managed multiple customers' strategic projects. He has gained expertise by managing different types of projects including end-to-end Development, Maintenance & Support, Production Support and Hybrid. Currently he is a faculty member in the Project Management Academy. He trains and mentors potential project managers and project leaders in his organization.

  Applications Delivery   Business Intelligence   CRM   Information Technology   Quality   Stakeholder Management   Strategy   Testing/Test Management  

Do you think project managers need to think beyond their current project boundary? Do they need to have foresight? What do they lose if they don’t have foresight?

All project managers want to ensure that their project gets executed smoothly and completed successfully. But a PM’s responsibility does not end there. My personal view is that though success of the current project is of paramount importance, they need to have foresight beyond that. This article is mainly applicable for development/major enhancement type projects.

After completion of the development or enhancement, customers start using the application for their business purpose--and would start realizing the benefit/value of the application. They would spend money (operating expense) for the support and maintenance work. Hence, during the development/enhancement stage, PMs need to keep in mind that the OPEX for the application maintenance/support should be optimized.

Let’s discuss how to understand this better. A PM needs to have insight for the below queries during the development/enhancement stage:

1. Does the support team need wider technical skills for the maintenance work?
2. Is the current solution a costly affair to the customer?
3. How easily can this application be enhanced?

Even though we got appreciation from the customer for the development/maintenance …

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