Project Management Best Practices For Offshore Software Development Model

Here are some of the project administration practices that a project manager should implement when managing offshore resources. 

Project management plays a crucial role in an organization’s overall progress. With the heightened competition in modern times, businesses expect project teams to work consistently and at a rapid pace. Only through the best project management practices, your performance can become better, faster, and more reliable. In project management, project managers have the role to plan, organize and manage resources to maximize the productivity and efficiency of the team.  The project management institute states that in addition to the applicable technical skills, a project manager needs to possess business management and leadership skills to ensure a project’s success.

In this gig economy, Most software companies today utilize offshore teams of developers to provide a more cost-effective option to clients looking for a solution to programming challenges. Offshore team management comes with its own set of challenges, but can also be worthwhile in ways that can enhance your life as a project manager.  We agree that managing a team of developers for an offshore software development project is not a walk in the park.  It’s even more difficult to manage a team from the other side of the world. In this article, we will try to lay out some of the project administration practices that a project manager should implement when managing offshore resources.

You may also read about the Key Project Management Methodologies

Know Your Team & Their Capabilities for offshore team management

Lack of face-to-face communication in teams remains a significant challenge when working with offshore teams. That is where research comes into the picture. 

Exercise due diligence: Stop slacking in important matters and do your due diligence. You need to find the best offshore software development outsourcing location for your business and weigh the pros and cons of each location. Weigh in to devise a comprehensible project scope and screen through quotes to set a realistic project budget.

Research the right vendor for the software development model: Connect strings with your preferred target location to scrutinize through recommendations and potential offshore team providers. Evaluate the technical capabilities of vendors through previous client feedback, portfolios, and case studies. 

Use outsourcing capabilities smartly: Get better at understanding the individual member’s skills when working with offshore teams and utilize them wisely to gain productivity in the work.  Defined project scope can additionally help you plan the availability of your team in advance and improve your project administration. Read More- Project Management Best Practices For Offshore Software Development Model

Estimating And Planning in Agile Project Management

There is no denying the fact that planning and estimation play a big role in the success of any project. While Agile methodologies continue to reign the IT world, the ordinary style of planning and estimation has declined to a big extent. That said, I am shedding light on how project managers can plan and estimate in Agile project management to make it a success.

Click here to learn why Agile Project Management is better than Traditional Project Management Approach.

Let’s Begin with Agile Planning

Due to the fluid nature of Agile, some project managers may think that there is no planning required in Agile project management. However, an important point to note here is that Agile project management entails specific kind of planning to handle the dynamic nature of Agile environment.

Since there are different Agile methodologies, like Scrum, Lean and Kanban, a lot of shared ideas exist on Agile planning. Here I am discussing the ones shared by most of the agile methodologies…Know more about- Estimating And Planning in Agile Project Management

Time Tracking Software: Saving Revenues by Eliminating Human Error

Resource management and time tracking are driving factors behind success of any project. It’s no more a hidden theory that manual tasks to track employees’ work hours are subject to human errors. In order to ensure efficient processing of invoices, payments, every company spends a lot of money on delegating special staff to track employees’ working hours, breaks, leaves, project deadlines, etc.

However, many business owners admit in dismay that manual keeping of employee records often results in gratuitous loss for their businesses in terms of money.

Now, think about time tracking tool that eliminates any risk of human error, whatsoever, that too with utmost ease. The tool, in form of a software, is designed keeping in mind all the important factors required for flawless employee management system and time tracking.

For example, biometric time attendance system, which ensures not only precise tracking of employee time, but also removes the convolution of payment processing…Learn more about the Time Tracking Software: Saving Revenues by Eliminating Human Error

How to Fail an Offshore Project?

I am a Sales guy in my present life. Before that I was a project manager, project lead and a developer. In the last 15 years, I’ve been part of many software projects in various capacities; seen some success stories and seen a fair share of failures as well. I’ve been asked to write this article based on my experience with various projects, clients from different geographies. Before I started to write this, I thought of Googling what other people have said on the same topic. I was overwhelmed by the number of articles, studies and research papers I saw. Wow! I wondered if there is anything new for me to say that has not been said already. When in doubt, go to the BOSS (who is always right). He reminded me to write my experiences. So, here I go.

 Before I actually start on the reasons, let me share one peculiar thing that I found in my study of already available material. Most of the articles and studies available on the subject, focus majorly on the reasons for failure on the vendor’s side. In my experience, I have seen that both the clients and vendors can work very hard to fail the project. So, here’s my angle to attack this story. Developing of software product is a journey that starts from idea to Go Live to maintenance. The cause for failure can be inducted in this journey at any stage by any stakeholder.

I’ve said earlier that right now I am a Sales guy. Every now and then, I get a chance to talk to a new potential client. I get to hear about their ideas for the development of new softwares. In today’s world softwares are not only developed by companies to help in their operations, but to be used by end users directly. These softwares can be in the domain of social applications, entertainment, e Commerce, education and what not. Many a times the client is just a person with an idea and not a company trying to develop something.

Read more about the- How to Fail an Offshore Project?

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly- Project Manager

Working in IT industry as a Project Manager,  I do come across my team members praising or complaining about Project Managers as how they have made their easy or hell in the project. Well mostly out of these are the ones who rather complain and seldom do I hear praises for the Project Managers. So is it really that grave of a situation and we can assume that all Project Managers are disciple of Hitler?

Well not so, I think there are 3 categories of PM – Good, Bad and Ugly. They as the name confers may not be like that in reality and it is the perception of the team members against the Project Manager. I know you must be getting confused here, so let’s evaluate each of these characteristics:

1. Good Project Manager – This is one, whom we will associate from the eyes of team members as the one who plans well, approves leaves of teams, takes pain to deliver projects, helpful and sensitive. These characteristics may be helpful in terms of employee satisfaction but they may not be in the eyes of Employer as for them you are too friendly with team and this friendliness removes the fear factor amongst them. With this token- Is Good project manager indeed a bad one, not with the above example. A good project manager is indeed a person who is friendly with the team but not too friendly such that people fear him not and start believing in laissez-faire. A good PM does exemplary work, motivates team/spirit, mitigates risks and issues, meets client expectation and other things that keep project status in Green but what he also does is take corrective actions if things are going haywire, manage people and see their timings in office, have a way to escalate and report if any team member is under-performing or is not adhering to company policies. With doing this what team members have always at the back of their mind is that there is a PM who can heed to their problems/issues at hand but he is also there with a Vulcan eyes who can catch them if they are wrong footed.

2. Bad Project Manager – Now this is the biggest drainer in an organization and this is what one should be careful about. A Bad PM is the one who has limited functional/technical knowledge and even then manages a team of IT developers. This PM will never be able to comprehend the daily nuances of software development. Since he lacks this he will also not be able to identify beforehand the risks and plan to mitigate them.. Read the complete blog at –The Good, The Bad, The Ugly- Project Manager

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly- Project Manager

Working in IT industry as a Project Manager, I do come across my team members praising or complaining about Project Managers as how they have made their easy or hell in the project. Well mostly out of these are the ones who rather complain and seldom do I hear praises for the Project Managers. So is it really that grave of a situation and we can assume that all Project Managers are disciple of Hitler?

Well not so, I think there are 3 categories of PM – Good, Bad and Ugly. They as the name confers may not be like that in reality and it is the perception of the team members against the Project Manager. I know you must be getting confused here, so let’s evaluate each of these characteristics:

1. Good Project Manager – This is one, whom we will associate from the eyes of team members as the one who plans well, approves leaves of teams, takes pain to deliver projects, helpful and sensitive. These characteristics may be helpful in terms of employee satisfaction but they may not be in the eyes of Employer as for them you are too friendly with team and this friendliness removes the fear factor amongst them. With this token- Is Good project manager indeed a bad one, not with the above example. A good project manager is indeed a person who is friendly with the team but not too friendly such that people fear him not and start believing in laissez-faire. A good PM does exemplary work, motivates team/spirit, mitigates risks and issues, meets client expectation and other things that keep project status in Green but what he also does is take corrective actions if things are going haywire, manage people and see their timings in office, have a way to escalate and report if any team member is under-performing or is not adhering to company policies. With doing this what team members have always at the back of their mind is that there is a PM who can heed to their problems/issues at hand but he is also there with a Vulcan eyes who can catch them if they are wrong footed.

2. Bad Project Manager – Now this is the biggest drainer in an organization and this is what one should be careful about. A Bad PM is the one who has limited functional/technical knowledge and even then manages a team of IT developers. This PM will never be able to comprehend the daily nuances of software development..Read more –The Good, The Bad, The Ugly- Project Manager

Big Data, Human Resources, and the Future of Hiring

Big data is gigantic amount of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data available from various sources across the internet and even internal systems. The problem though is, how to utilize this vast resource of vital information. The answer is Big data analytics. Big data analytics is now seen as the future of human resources and recruitment, like any other organizational function.

In the present scenario, almost every job seeker exists on social media, online job portals, etc. This provides HR professionals a great opportunity to identify top talent with the help of right analytical tools to dig into this data.

Previous means to recruit were past experiences, opinions and guts. But making uninformed decisions while hiring often resulted into selection of poor candidates, and subsequently into considerable revenue losses for businesses.

However, with the advent of big data, it’s now possible to gauge a candidate’s potential performance, skills, productivity, etc. in order to ensure accomplishment of desired objectives. All you need are right tools to accumulate, mine, analyze the data for managing tasks related to human resources.

LinkedIn, a social network of millions of professionals, acquired Bright in 2014 to use its algorithm in order to extract useful information from massive data that exists in its database…Read full blog- Big Data, Human Resources, and the Future of Hiring

Apart from that you can also learn more informative blogs related, web development,web design and mobile apps development to increase your skills.

Why Web Based Project Management Is The Future

Project management is pivotal to success of every project. But traditional means of project management have become obsolete now as they are not as effective as expected for some domains like software development. With traditional approach, project managers often face problems in planning, monitoring and controlling. But significant advancement in technology in IT has brought forward a modern approach called web based project management. It helps you effortlessly, effectively track the status of your project from the beginning to very end.

It gives you an assurance that your project resources, expenses, time and equipment are all worth to make your project a success. Web based project management gives rise to collaboration, which is one of the major concerns of project managers who use desktop based software that requires installation on different machines.

 

Web based project management ensures that all the documents related to the project are  available at one place at any given moment. Besides, any member of the project team can access the information from any part of the world through any web browser, which boosts performance, productivity and efficiency. Collaborative features of web based project management helps team members send instant messages, set up email alerts and share files… read full blog- Why Web Based Project Management Is The Future

Why Agile Project Management is better than Traditional Project Management Approach?

                               

Agile Project Management Methodology has emerged as a great alternative to traditional project management methodology, like Waterfall. Agile is predominant in IT and software projects since it allows to adapt to rapidly changing business environments. Unlike traditional project management, Agile calls for producing and delivering work in short bursts, also called sprints.

Gathering all the requirements before the development team even starts writing the code puts your software at a great risk of being not in line with current market demands and become a failure. When you decide what your product should be in the very beginning, you tend to ignore important iterations that must be made during the development lifecycle, thereby preventing your final product from being the right fit for the market.

A plethora of project management methodologies are available in tech market, however, for the success and timely completion of a project, it’s imperative to choose the one that fits your business requirements and empowers the product development to keep the pace with changing client demands.

Key characteristics of Agile Project Management

• Empowers developers to self-organize the task
• Enhances learning, knowledge sharing and communications among team members
• Emergent behavior to deal with uncertainty
• ..Read Full blog at- Why Agile Project Management is better than Traditional Project Management Approach?

Key Project Management Methodologies: PRINCE2, NPI, RAD, Scrum and Waterfall

Is project management really a conundrum of almost every project manager? Well, experts say not for those who know to bring key project management methodologies to their advantage. A cutting-edge project management methodology is designed to assist project managers in flawlessly dealing with problems and ensuring timely completion.

Moreover, a project management methodology allows project managers to set different tasks to complete a project and manage ad-hoc resources as and when the need arise.

Usually, there are five processes in a project management methodology

• Initiate
• Plan
• Execute
• Monitor
• Close

An organization that takes the responsibility of completing a project for a customer has to deploy a project manager, right resources and a capable team to ensure the same. Therefore, a project management methodology acts nothing less than a savior for a project manager who is responsible for the entire project in the end. In this blog, I am discussing five most popular project management methodologies: PRINCE2, Scrum, Waterfall, NPI and RAD… Read Full Blog at – Key Project Management Methodologies: PRINCE2, NPI, RAD, Scrum and Waterfall