You're starting a new project. How can you ensure your team's success?

This step also includes: * Understand overarching vision - Frequently, a project or deliverable is a component of a larger strategy. Therefore, it is crucial to comprehend how this project aligns with the broader plan. * Identify your stakeholders - Recognizing the individuals or groups invested in the project, as well as those who can provide support in overcoming obstacles or clarifying scope-related inquiries, is valuable. * Establish success criteria - This serves as a fundamental initial step by articulating the criteria for evaluating the success of the project.

There are a few questions you may want to reflect on before logging requirements. There are different tools available for scope management, which largely fall under either the waterfall or agile project management domains, do you know what tools and methodologies make the most sense for your project? You may find that there are various degrees to which you can tolerate scope creep on a given project, what are the parameters? If the scope grows, who pays for it and does the product owner have budget authority? As you are logging scope, what features are required to deliver a successful project?

Projects produce products. Answer questions about the product before you start building it. The questions you should answer about the product are well outlined by Amazon's Working Backwards principles. 1/Who is the customer? 2/What problem is this product solving? 3/What's the benefit of this product's approach? 4/How do you know what your customer needs or wants? 5/What does your customer's experience look like? You -will- be answering those 5 questions at some point. Answering them early, even preliminary answers, is a lot cheaper when working with designs and plans than it will be when expectations, timelines and resources are committed to the project.

While project scope definition has evolved significantly in the last 30 years from a simple list of deliverables to a comprehensive document that outlines the project’s goals, objectives, deliverables, timelines, and budget constraints. In my opinion the agile movement has had a significant effect on its trajectory. It has influenced project scope definition by emphasizing the importance of collaboration, flexibility, and adaptive planning. It ensures that the project stays within schedule and budget constraints. While welcoming changes to product requirements even late in the development process.

Having a scope document is just the start. It has to have a sufficient level of detail to allow us to map and track against initial estimates, which will allow us to present budget overruns. Finally, it is essential to agree on a change control process now with the relevant stakeholders.

Engage your team and work with them to understand what they feel are the best tools for the job. Facilitate them making these decisions. Help by mitigating risk and ensuring cross compatibility.

Code/component reusability must be considered thoroughly when you define this phase regardless of the technology you are using. You should avoid your application being tightly coupled for so many good reasons

In addition to just choosing the tools is rapidly setting up some end to end build system in those tools. Having a fast developer loop and clear ways to test will give the team confidence to iterate on choices. The best advice I'm seeing in a number of comments is to delay the immovable choices as long as possible. Fast interations support that. Some of the worst projects I've done is where the database schema was setup first with no easy migration setup

Almost entirely agree, the right tools for the right job. You shouldn’t be using a hammer to dig a hole! Not all team members will have the same experience in using all of the tools around, acknowledging there are gaps and setting up team sessions to help them succeed with the tooling will not only build team morale but will also enhance the successful delivery of the project.

To kick off - start with simple architecture that is well understood by business -Ensure that architecture is used and updated in all initial discussions to understand the dependencies - Always include both Business and Technical stakeholders to get their viewpoint -Understand your team's skillset and their adaptability to change. - Engage the team during tool selection

Kick off the project by bringing the team together and providing them an opportunity to build team culture. Ideally, this is a colocation event. Build a high performance team by developing a sense of togetherness. Use the kickoff to share rules and parameters, but also to inspire with the project vision.

Organizing the team is crucial to success. Just need to make sure all position within the team works efficiently by separating the responsibilities properly. I've seen projects that failed because of the bad organization of the team. 1. Avoid annoying meetings when the developer has nothing to do with it. 2. Good communication is a must. 3. Avoid bureaucracy

From my experience, crafting an effective development team is paramount. Align roles with members' skills to ensure clarity and a shared objective. Embrace agile methodologies for adaptable project breakdowns, especially in complex scenarios. Utilize task management tools for transparent communication. Use platforms such as Microsoft Teams to enhance remote collaboration. Regular check-ins and feedback sessions set performance standards, fostering alignment and swift issue resolution. A well-organized team, with defined roles, workflows, and communication channels, is vital for success in application development projects.

Look for people who can learn anything in their respective fields. All the other details matter less than that. If you've got people who can't learn you're going to overburden the ones who can.

First step is to gather your team (likely remotely) and outline: - Project aims, timescales, expectations of the customer and methods (agile) - Governance model (when, who, where, how proof of value can be demonstrated) and frequency - Team structure - who looks after what part of the solution - Team tools - IM/Messaging, IDE’s, Repos, Automation Tools, Project Documentation Library - RACI model and what the lines of escalation or problem management is - who do I need to talk to? - Feedback process - what went well, what didn’t and how to improve - Don’t forget RISK!

Testing is quite crucial if you want to deliver high-quality software. It will help you identify issues before they reach to end user. 100% code coverage should be a requirement in a perfect world. But if you do not, at least make sure you prepare and test the most important scenarios.

You need to set the rules for testing. Start out by analyzing the scope, stakeholders, and project impact. Get input from your team when setting testing requirements, and factor in any explicit project expectations around testing. Draft a testing plan, and share it with the team. Make sure you have your teams buy-in. Set periodic review periods to ensure the project delivery is within compliance.

Make sure to test behaviours that are asked of you by the client. Client wouldn't care if a function X returns a true or false, but they will care if they cant processes payments.

Practice Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development during development, and when you pass it off to Quality Assurance or Quality Engineering, make sure they test as many edge cases as they can from the end user level.

Even though you may conduct application testing with professional testers to identify bugs or technical issues, the most valuable feedback often comes from end users with average or even low skills in using the application. These end users typically represent 80% of your market, making it crucial to engage a few individuals outside your organization to test the system and provide their feedback.

Continous build and deploy with automated unit testing. Ensure the build can be rolled back in case of issues in the production.

Use automation as much as possible, and use a modular approach. For the industry you are deploying for, use best of breed tools as they will be fine tuned for maximum coverage. Don’t just think about dev tools, but operational management and monitoring need to be baked in at day 1. Diagnostics added early will help later.

I have two philosophies to share on this: 1. Automate as much as possible. 2. Pursue generic solutions. There are great tools that will facilitate this. Modern solutions may look like CI/CD pipelines deploying containerized applications to multi-cloud environments.

Evaluating a project allows for continuous improvement. Regular assessments help identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for refinement. This ongoing feedback loop enables teams to adapt, address challenges, and optimize processes, ultimately enhancing the project's overall performance and increasing the likelihood of achieving successful outcomes.

This is a great opportunity to have a retrospective, where everyone can get involved in sharing their thoughts on what went well and what didn't. Try to make it a positive experience, this part is not about pointing fingers but about how can we grow stronger as a team. Example: Dont - Joe yet again merged tones of code without a single test! Our production gone down twice! Do - overall we have a large number of bugs that slowed this project down, as a result I felt very nervous when it came to releasing it. What can we do to avoid this the next time round? Why? Whilst there is a time and a place for direct approach, with indirect approach we are letting others to reflect themselves and solutionise on how to avoid this in the future.

Retrospectives are the key. It will give you an idea about what went alright, what went wrong and what needs to be improved. Besides it gives your team an equal opportunity to share their honest feedback.

Although it is great to have a grand party to celebrate a project's success at the very end, it is important to set realistic deadlines and celebrate small milestones along the way! This will help a team assess progress, keep an eye on the big picture and motivate them towards the end goal!

The golden question... Project management involves different well defined areas to consider, all of which are key to achieving success. It's not really about the success of the team, but rather the success of the project, in other words delivering the scope, on time, and on budget, while managing risks and handling issues. All thus coordinated and communicated in a way that allows stakeholders to have a clear view of status and plan.

Focus on the customer’s needs first. How can you make them successful? What is it they really need? Then focus on delivering a minimal version of your product that shows that value. Everything else derives from that

Each team would see success differently. Is it to make more money? Is it to improve processes? It can be a number of things. The key thing to remember is that this is a journey and the more the team collaborates and reflects, the further they get. Rome was not built in a day!

Starting a project requires clear objectives, executive/client support, and a comprehensive assessment of the current state. Formulate a clear vision and strategy, assemble a skilled team, and prioritize training on the domain/subject. Establish transparent communication, help employees adapt, and ensure compliance measures are taken. Measure progress with KPIs and celebrate successes. Collaborate with internal and external partners and stay client-centric to deliver value keeping the team in sync with the progress.

Define the benefits the project needs to deliver, everything else (scope, time and other constraints) is dictated by the benefits and serves to deliver them.