The Lack of Project Management in Software Development

This is a repost from my previous website. I am moving to Wix.

I’ve been working for software companies for over 20 years. Project Management has been an established professional field for much longer than that. I earned my PMP certification in 2013. I work in the User Assistance part of software development. There continues to be a lack of real project management inside software development factories, and I wonder why.

Many companies sell project management services to their customers, or they include it in the package price of the software sold. Project management certainly gives clients a degree of certainty that projects will be run on time, within budget, to the expected degree of quality. If that doesn’t happen, clients know they have the ear of the Project Manager to get things corrected.

But internally inside the software factories, how many development teams actually use real trained, professional Project Managers? I believe that very few actually do. I need to do research to support what my experience tells me. Usually, the Dev managers, Product Definition, Product Managers, or some other member of the Dev team assumes this role, typically with no special project management training. This type of project management typically leads to project mismanagement, projects that exceed scope, run late, run over budget, and sometimes even have to get pulled from the software at the last minute.

If companies spent more money on hiring professional Project Managers to manage their internal processes, they would reap the benefits again and again. Why do companies fail to do this? I will examine that question more in a later blog.

#costefficiency #returns