Project Management

Project Managers and Application Delivery

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

With the growth of software as a service (SaaS) applications and the expansion of cloud-based infrastructures, the number of projects that result in products that need to be deployed into a remote, managed environment (rather than deployed to a physical corporate data center, packaged up and shipped or rolled out to desktops) is growing significantly.

This is clearly a critical part of a project--without it, the project fails. But I run into a lot of project managers who see this release element as only peripheral to their accountabilities--seeing it as a “specialist” release management function. The logic is that because release management handles this function--and because release management tends not to be involved in any of the project elements leading up to that point--it isn’t really part of the project.

Further, I frequently see project managers not being involved in the initial discussions that occur when the project is being conceived around how the solution should be architected, whether it should be SaaS or not--and if so, where and how it should be hosted. This isn’t generally the PM’s fault--despite awareness for many years that project managers need to be assigned and engaged earlier in the planning cycle, it is still not happening consistently.

However, because they aren’t part of those decisions, the importance of buy…


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