Divide and Conquer

Divide and Conquer Geoff Choo February 25, 2002

How To Applying PM Principles Advice, Anecdotes and Case Studies

Let's face it: Customers want it fast and they want it now. No matter how good you may be at building consensus, motivating and leading your team, the one and only metric that most people care about is how good (or bad) you are at delivering your projects on time, on target and on budget. With customers demanding increasingly sophisticated software on shrinking timeframes and on even thinner budgets, one of the best ways to successfully deliver a software application is to develop and release small, working versions of the software in incremental stages throughout the lifetime of the project.

Forget about the traditional all-or-nothing waterfall approach where the customer only gets the finished application in one big lump after nine months of sub-secret work. Smart project managers are learning to smoothen the steep development curve of complex projects by breaking it into series of small incremental packets of features and functionality that you can release to your client in short, iterative stages.

Begin with the end in mind.
Where do you begin? Sit down with your client and stakeholders to define a crystal-clear understanding of the vision behind the project: What are you trying to build, why are you building it and whom are you building it for? Help them build a collective vision of the final product in their minds.