IT Project Tips and Tricks - 01 - Intro

I graduated from college in 1978 as a Computer Science major and worked in IT for forty-one years, retiring in 2019. In my career I programmed apps on everything from standalone mainframes to internet connected phones. In 2001, I was somewhat reluctantly promoted to IT Management at a large company employing hundreds in the IT Department and that is where all my technical project management experience comes from. There, I was exposed to many different IT methodologies, and thru trial and error, I arrived at a development approach that worked well. It borrowed mostly from agile / extreme methodologies, but also borrowed some of the useful RUP artifacts such as the Use Case and the UML Class and Sequence diagrams.  I managed a team of custom app developers, and it took years of hard knocks to learn what worked and what didn't, but in the end the driving force was always to BE PRACTICAL and only do those things that provided value in terms of making the project succeed, so agility was the prime directive.  Our approach successfully delivered many difficult projects ranging from financial applications to the company intranet. In this series of articles, I will cover the following, assuming you already have a good background on these topics, so I will only touch on them at the level of tips and tricks and what worked for us. 

  1. The Seven Sacred Disciplines of Application Development
  2. The Methodology
  3. Essential Project Team Members
  4. The E0 and Beyond
  5. Iterations and Release Planning
  6. Requirements
  7. Architecture and Design
  8. The Sanctity of Source Code
  9. Coding
  10. Stand Up Meeting
  11. Environments and Deployment
  12. Testing
  13. Go Live Cutover
  14. Babysitting After Go Live
I should mention that all the above apply to developing an app from scratch. We are not talking about maintenance here. Although a large maintenance project would use many of the above steps whereas a simple maintenance project would not.  For example, a small cosmetic change to an app would just the code, developer test, UAT test and deploy approach.

Hope someone gets some value from this!

Comments

Post a Comment