Feb 08
6
The Finer Points of Project Management
Posted by Stephen6
Tags: challenge, priorities, work
There’s this electronic gizmo I’ve been tinkering with for half my life. The problem with building such devices is that they never stand still. Technology races on ahead while you’re not looking. My digital camera, for example, was out of date before I finished figuring out the manual. In this industry, you’ve barely finished a project before it’s obsolete and you have to start thinking about replacing it. You know you’re in trouble when the next version is out of date before you’ve finished designing it. Anyway, I’m right in the middle of designing that next version. This isn’t just a tweaking of the old design, a fresh coat of paint here, some new windows there. This is a complete rebuild from the inside out. In fact, the only things that remain from the current device are the four walls and the roof.
All kinds of experts are involved in this design process. All very intelligent and experienced, with great ideas. All very capable of leading us down the garden path, until we fall into the well. So for your continuing education, here are some of the more subtle aspects of project management.
Feature Creep
This is the concept that just because we can, we should. Engineering thinks that if 128MB of memory is good then 256MB is better. OK, just to be safe we should bump that up to 512MB. Well, we might as well go to a round 1GB. Prices will have come down by the time we build. Besides, they never thought people would need more than 640K in a PC, did they? And look at how that went. No. You can never have too much memory. But now the basic USB port we’d planned for is just too slow. Do you know how long it’ll take to fill 1GB? Half an hour! We must upgrade to a high-speed port. It’ll fill the memory in less than a minute!
Actually, now that we have a high-speed USB port, we could…
See how it goes? And before you know it the system has all these bells and whistles and costs twice as much as originally estimated.
Marketing also has its say. Do you know how many more of these we would sell, if only it had a holographic projector? And seven-channel surround sound? OK, so it’ll have pretty poor battery life. But we could build in a rechargeable battery complete with charger. The user would only have to plug it in to charge every two hours or so. And while we’re talking about surround sound, do you know how difficult it’ll be for the user to carry all those speakers? Not really portable any more, is it? So it doesn’t really need to be battery-powered after all. The user can just plug it into the wall. See how much money we’ll save, not having to include a battery charger?
And so you start off your day thinking you’re developing a bicycle, and finish with the plans for a Sherman tank.
Philosophical Differences
Feature creep inevitably leads to arguments discussions on what our true goals are, who is our target demographic, what are the fundamentals this project is based on, what’s arbitrary and what’s non-negotiable. There’s the faction that wants to segment the market and create dozens of variations at different price points. They’re up against the faction that wants to keep it simple: one solution, one price. There are the hardware enthusiasts, who are convinced that if the circuitry is perfect then the software will simply fall into place. They’re being targeted by the software evangelists, who know that the program is the soul of the machine, and who try to convict everyone else of the error of their ways and lead them into the light.
The bean-counters fret that it’ll cost too much. The visionaries don’t care how much it costs. The artists expect the engineers to mold technology to their creation. The engineers grumble that the artists have no grasp on reality. And so it goes.
Legacy & Tradition
Tradition claims that we’ve always done it that way, and why should we change? It worked before, didn’t it? Legacy’s supporting argument is that we don’t want to throw out all our past work. There may be better ways of doing things now, but we invested so much, and it was perfect. Twenty years ago. Besides, we can’t afford to do it all again. It’s far easier and cheaper and safer just to re-use our existing design. This is the official statement from the a-new-coat-of-paint-is-all-it-takes group, otherwise known as the Whitewash Division.
Logistics
In the meantime, time is ticking away and costs are mounting. There’s a lot of pressure to keep things on schedule and under budget. But you know what they say about engineering: you can have it fast, good, or cheap. Pick any two of those three.
Successful project management takes all those factors (and factions) into consideration, cutting through the dross, heading off the tangents, reeling in the flights of fancy. We’re dealing with experts, after all, who have great ideas and the ability to carry them out. The trick is to get this bunch of individuals, each convinced of the certainty of his own plan of action, to strive together in the same direction toward a common goal. It gets noisy sometimes, and I hope it doesn’t get too messy. Who said work couldn’t be fun?
