Large software projects and how to ensure success.

Keep a constant eye on “the big picture”, not doing so is like taking your eye of the ball in a football game – guaranteed failure.

The lessons behind this single, overarching consideration come from seeing project after project driven down into detail at the earliest opportunity. I attribute this to discomfort with open questions, discomfort with ambiguity and also the personality traits that are essential for project managers to succeed at the later stages of exciting the project – I.e. attention to detail, a strong focus on delivering against a set task and a discomfort will undefined problems.  

Are you an executive with a big project in mind? Maybe it’s already a business imperative? How do you start? These are the sort of questions that are so often gotten wrong. Here are some tips:

• Don’t assign a project manager when you’re still shaping the project
• Keep and open mind and consider as many strategic options as possible
• Get the right “startup team” in place

To expand on each point above:

Project managers are generally not the right people to shape a project’s overall direction, what’s needed at this stage is a skilled individual with strategic and wide ranging business experience but also with the detailed delivery experience that’s gained through living through large projects.

Changing direction on a large project, once set, is terribly difficult if not impossible. It’s essential that radically different strategic options are explored and understood before money is spent on any one direction. Believe me, this is perhaps the single most important measure on any large project. The difference between strategic options can be orders of magnitude!

These initial steps require deep skills, wide experience and people willing to work with ambiguity and an open mind. Often not the attributes you need to run a project day to day, so put in place a project startup team that have the right characteristics to shape and can guide the running project to success.

This isn’t is a comprehensive guide to project management, however it will help anyone facing the challenge of working within a similar project, at least as a reminder of things that need to be attended to.

These notes are drawn directly from my experience working at a senior level within large scale software projects – typically in the $100’s of millions of dollar/euro budget range. During a period of 30 years, I’ve seen both successes and (rather more) failures; I have observed and captured a good picture of where and how things come unstitched, why they come unstitched and what steps can be taken to reduce the chances of failures. I have attempted to capture those lessons here.