Why is it important to have Project Manager?

Project management is an essential part of software development process.

Who is Project Manager? This is the person responsible for leading the whole project. He/she coordinates the work of the team to ensure project tasks completion and goals achievement within the given constraints – in particular, time and budget.

Project Manager is actually a single point of contact for a Customer.

 

What does Project manager actually do?

To make things more clear, let’s look though the key responsibilities that Project Manager has.

 

1. Budget and Commitment management  

Project Manager guarantees commitment realization within the approved budget range.  This way, Customer can be sure that the project team will make every effort to reach the business value.

Project Manager performs the following activities and provides the following deliverables to achieve this:

• Project implementation plan with a necessary level of details – from high-level roadmap for small projects to detailed schedule for complicated products.
• Project budget utilization plan that provides clear budget burndown understanding and predictable payment schedule.
• Project backlog that contains all the features and requirements that should be implemented (ordered in accordance with business priority and importance for customer).

 

2. Change Management

Project Manager helps Customer to adapt the project to changing business needs.  He/she provides assistance with keeping the already reached value and enhancing the future benefits in a new business domain configuration.

Here are the key tools for this activity:

• Project impact map that helps the project team to understand how different decisions affect the project execution.
• Project Backlog that helps to resolve dependencies on a project scope that can be impacted by changes in Customer’s business.

 

3. Risk and Opportunity Management

Project Manager continually analyzes business environment to identify the events that may impact the project execution. Both positive and negative events (opportunities and risks respectively) are in the scope of this analyze.

Special tools are being used in project management to cover this responsibility:

• Project Risk Registry which provides the ability to manage the already known risks and their impact on the project. Prevention and mitigation plans are a mandatory part of this tool.
• Opportunity Backlog which is intended to identify the existing opportunities for the project. The goal is to achieve the additional value for Customer with predictable impact on the budget or schedule.

 

4. Relationship management

Project Manager builds the environment that allows all the involved stakeholders to get all the necessary information regarding the project:

• Project Manager governs the communication quality, feedback transfer in any directions, and reaction that follows the feedback. He/she organizes and facilitates project meetings and ensures that all the participants whose participation is required are involved.
• Documenting and distributing all the agreements reached during the project implementation (as well as their impact on project) are duties of Project Manager. Regular or on-demand reporting is a part of this activity.

• Expectations management.

NOTE: The list of activities and deliverables depends on the particular project and may differ according to the necessity and business needs.

 

Why having Project Manager is beneficial for a Customer?

So, let’s sum up why it is important to appoint Project Manager on a project and emphasize the key benefits that Customer gets.

 

1. Project success

Project Manager leads a project team to success using all of his/her knowledge, experience and up-to-date industry best practices.

Based on our experience, we can say: continuous productivity and process improvement increase successful project execution probability by up to 100%.

To ensure the project success, Project manager:

• Helps with the definition of the relevant business goals
• Sets operational tasks for the team according to business goals
• Provides the achievement of the defined business goals.

 

2. Project transparency

Clear and understandable project status available for all the stakeholders on every phase is a result of Project Management activity. To achieve this, Project Manager:

• Provides transparency
• Eliminates communication leaks, feedback ignoring, and knowledge encapsulation.

 

3. Project efficiency

Project Manager implements a project development model that allows to achieve the maximum business value with the minimal effort. The chosen methodology responds to customer needs and expectation (Waterfall or incremental approach, Rup or Agile). Decreased time-to-market and implementation waste are the key benefits.

In particular, Project Manager:

• Matches the available resources (human, time financial) with customer needs to achieve the project goals (resource optimization).
• Builds the team that performs efficiently
• Defines and implements the relevant development methodology
• Manages the opportunities and dependencies.

Here at ISS Art we have a team of talented project managers who have already helped dozens of our customers worldwide to achieve their ambitious business goals.

Get in touch with us for more information.