Monday, April 30, 2018

A crash course in project management


Introduction

A project starts as soon as you have a team of people working towards a goal. The naive approach is to start emailing backwards and forwards. This results in a mess of transactions that hides important patterns. Adding in some shared documents, say using Google Docs, only creates greater confusion. This quagmire is avoided by structuring work through project management software.

But which app? There are several overlapping categories of software, and within each category are dozens, if not hundreds, of potential solutions. This article will help simplify, by explaining the core concepts and defining terms. If you are new to project management, this article should save you a few dozen confusing hours.


Saturday, April 28, 2018

A short history of development methodologies

Currently in the news is an IT meltdown at TSB. A mega-project to migrate their banking software has ended in complete chaos, with clients unable to access their accounts, deductions from one person being made to another, pay cheques gone missing, etc. It's just about the worst outcome any software development project can have, and proof again that large development projects simply do not work.