Software Project Management - Science or Art ?

The discipline of Project management primarily evolved in the construction industry – and was very well documented. As the advantages were clearly visible – the practice of project management extended to other sectors as well. Each sector brought its own influences on Project Management – but none of them significantly impacted the core principles. But when the software industry started developing – the practice of project management was impacted in a major way. The difference being – the amount of people dependency while developing software is significant – so the primarily resource based –principles of project management – had to be adapted to people influences.

As opposed to other industries – the software industry is so people intensive that even the science of project management has now evolved into something of an art-form . Take estimation as an example – in the construction industry – you know that laying a slab will take 4 weeks and it is more or less a standard , now in the software industry –writing a JSP page – there are programmers who – in the right environment – given the right motivation would complete it in 3 days. The same guys in the wrong environment – and if not motivated would take 7 days. To make things more complex –set of programmers would react to differently to the same factors for. E.g. some programmers say that music helps them to concentrate and it is not uncommon to see C++ code being written to the loud accompaniment of Van-Halen of Aero Smith. However some guys would prefer Mozart and some no music at all – because it distracts them. All these guys would make a part of the projects managers’ team. And he has to now estimate how much a piece of work – to be done by these mavericks is going to take. Now what technique is going to help the poor project manager? Hence – he has to be more of an artist than a technician in order to manage these situations.

More importantly what has now emerged as a parallel expertise – is the discipline of Offshore Project Management. In this so called flat-word where communication channels have made off shoring not only possible but also very effective – a new field has emerged. Offshore project management – has to deal with the added complexity of managing a customer stakeholder who is miles away and also at times managing staff who is working from different geographical locations. As such it becomes even more of an art-form though a lot of books have been written on this subject trying to make it a science but the tremendous pace at which the market is changing makes it difficult for any paradigm to stick.

So that’s where we leave – Software Project Management or more so Offshore Software project management – Art or Science – you decide!!

I haven’t been able to figure out how I have been doing it for the last 10 years!! But I have been doing it for sure.

- Abhijeet Dixit