Developing high-quality and reliable software is a challenging task that demands a comprehensive and structured approach. It can be hard to pave the right path toward the success of your product when technology is evolving so quickly. When the development process is continuously redefined, startups and businesses with a long history must be especially careful when choosing IT project management services to fit their goals.
In our article, we will tell you everything you need to know about the role of project management in software development, the project manager’s responsibilities, how to build and implement a suitable and highly functional process based on ExpertTal’s best practices for managing offshore resources and more than seven years of experience at the international software development market.
Read on to learn how to manage a development team effectively!
Practice shows that a dedicated team is a particularly successful solution for long-term projects with frequently changing requirements. Mainly because specially appointed experts rule the project. This provides maximum flexibility in the scope of work and tasks and in the changes in costs and resources.
Additionally, our experts have broad experience in managing international projects of different complexity within multiple industries, which makes it easier to develop successful solutions.
Here’s a list of standard project manager’s responsibilities and what each of them includes:
One of the most important parts of the project’s discovery phase is an estimation. Determining the cost, duration, and necessary efforts for the project is crucial. The estimation usually includes time, price, and team composition.
It’s imperative that the project manager correctly estimates these deliverables with the team, as all future planning and executions are dependent on these projections.
If you define the project management scope right in the beginning, it becomes much easier for the team to manage and make the required changes. Scope management helps in determining and documenting the list of all the project goals, tasks, deliverables, deadlines, and budgets as a part of the planning process.
After the estimation is ready; it is important to communicate it with the team and go over predicted expectations. First, hold a meeting where every team member can discuss their part in the project and ask questions. In addition to communicating expectations, create and share your project scope with the team.
This document is the foothold allowing your software development team to understand tasks, goals, and time frames, providing a clear plan to follow. Go over each point with your team and specify each team member's role in the project.
Project scheduling refers to the roadmap of all planned actions and activities within a specific timeline. Project managers define tasks, milestones, and accountable team members. They manage the manner and execution order of each task determining their priority.
Everything that is used in project development refers to resource management. Usually, it includes a team, tools, and software libraries. It’s very important to estimate and assign sufficient resources needed for the successful project implementation at the very beginning of the development. A shortage of any element can cause falling off the development schedule and increase costs in the end.
Risk management identifies, analyzes, and incorporates explicit and implicit risks into the project course and development. These include:
No project can ever be considered successful without perfectly maintained project documentation. The project manager will have to prepare the final documentation of the project for future reference and implementation, detailing features, techniques, and specifications.
These reports will contribute to future project management in software development-related tasks and help in updates and support if needed.
The project manager can’t be considered an optional addition to the development team. The person in this position is responsible for streamlining the development process with a software development life cycle and project management timeline.
In software development, project managers essentially use the general project management template with software-specific goals that streamline the process.
Software project management stages are usually outlined as follows:
This stage of project management for app development is aimed at forming the initial idea into a clear goal with understandable future steps. Usually, it can be done by creating a project charter – a document consisting of important details, including project goals, the expected timeline, human resources, budget, bottlenecks, etc.
Once the charter is ready and the main project objectives are outlined, the next step is identifying key stakeholders. Even though the primary goals are established in the project initiation stage, they shouldn’t include complex technical details as this is the task for stage two.
This stage is a decisive factor for the project’s roadmap. The development process is broken down into iterations depending on the chosen software development methodology and the project’s requirements. We usually use an agile software development strategy as it has clear pros:
This stage includes identifying technical requirements, developing detailed project scheduling, creating a clear communication plan, and establishing goals/deliverables. During planning, it’s good to consult other members of the team and use inputs from the business analysts, sales department, and domain experts.
By establishing an effective workflow, the project manager should ensure that everyone involved in the project is on the same page and the development process runs as smoothly as possible.
It is also important that the project manager sets up both Critical Success Factors (CSF) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to ensure that no one deviates from the original course of the project and that the project objectives and deliverables are fulfilled.
Also, the manager has to track and record the effort/cost during the development process to confirm that the budget and time are met with long-term sustainability in mind.
The final stage of the project development process is evaluation. At this stage, a project manager reviews the whole project from the beginning to the end, completes a detailed report that covers after facets, finalizes all the necessary paperwork and documentation, and securely stores the project for future reference.
From our experience, we suggest holding a review meeting when the project is completed. It helps to contemplate a team's comprehensive successes and failures before, during, and after development.
The project manager is one of the most important people on the project, even though sometimes it may not be so obvious as the project manager’s responsibilities go way beyond simply creating tasks and checking in with team members. They are responsible for the project's success, adherence to deadlines, communication between the team and the client, and crisis management.
A skilled PM not only answers the question of how to manage developers but also how to make a project successful.
It is statistically proven that a mature project management process makes an organization far more likely to deliver on time and under budget. 11.4% of all resources are wasted due to the lack of project management processes. Surveys suggest that organizations that fail to integrate project management into their strategies will see their outright project failure rate increase by 2/3.
From our experience, project managers know all the possible pitfalls, allocate resources accordingly, and make a substitution without any idle effort as they know the capabilities of each development team member. Thus, delegating management and app development tasks to a project manager is more resultful as a PM doesn’t need time to adjust and understand the context of project development.
However, it doesn’t mean that a client loses control of the process. On the contrary, a PM works closely with a client taking over the operational tasks, which allows a client to focus on the strategic aspects.
Our project managers build a seamless process of client-team communication, giving the clients instant updates on the project development and letting the client keep track.
Effective communication is one of the most important parts of a successful project. It bridges gaps between the client and the organization, among the team members as well as other stakeholders in the project.
A PMI survey found that 30% of respondents called “poor communication” the primary reason for the scope gap and project failure. Thus, it’s very important to plan communication for every project you launch.
A project communication plan is an agreement between executors and stakeholders that outlines what, when, and how the information will be shared and what are the key intervals. This written guide should include information on status updates, task-related questions, and meeting details. The goal is to define and streamline team and client communications as much as possible.
The signal is that your communication plan’s failing if the excessive discussion around the project occurs or the scope of each interaction isn’t defined. The project management communication plan for app development includes a contact sheet with project roles and relevant contact information that highlights project phase owners
The benefits of a good project communication plan include staying in line with budget, timeline, and scope expectations. It also saves the effort of having to answer individual “what’s the status” emails. When there is a plan to ensure that all stakeholders are kept appropriately informed, your project team can respond to change, ensure good client management, and maintain a high standard of communication.
A secret to productive, well-organized, and efficient project management lies in the field of skilled professionals. Remote team management can be truly challenging, but the benefits it brings for your business can certainly make it worth the resources and efforts you put in first.
From our experience, we can say that highly-experienced professionals with hands-on experience in multiple industries, well-established workflow, transparent communication, and mutual feedback exchange are the keys to effective distributed teams and project management for app development.
Besides, if you still have any questions or are looking to switch to an extended team model, take a look over our development services, as we can set up a dedicated team for your needs. Feel free to contact us to ask any questions on project management outsourcing and managing offshore teams!
It is possible, but it has a lot of drawbacks. Firstly, it disrupts communication with the team, and secondly, it complicates the processes. Ultimately, the time and effort spent on software development can be many times higher than if you simply hire a project manager to join your dev team.
Definitely a project manager. It is he who makes the project plan for app development, but you can make adjustments to it, so clear synchronization between you, the project manager, and the development team is necessary.
Hourly rates for project managers vary widely. Optimally, we would recommend considering candidates costing at least $25 per hour. Otherwise, you risk falling for not the most experienced manager, which will result in a bunch of problems. You can contact our team for more detailed and substantive advice.
Kamal Rastogi is a serial IT entrepreneur with 25 yrs plus experience. Currently his focus area is Data Science business, ERP Consulting, IT Staffing and Experttal.com (Fastest growing US based platform to hire verified / Risk Compliant Expert IT resources from talent rich countries like India, Romania, Philippines etc...directly). His firms service clients like KPMG, Deloitte, EnY, Samsung, Wipro, NCR Corporation etc in India and USA.