You're leading a software engineering project. How can strategic planning ensure its success?

Strategic planning facilitates not only setting but communicating the vision. With a clear vision and defined outcomes, it makes it easier for the team to coalesce around the project or initiative ... vision and expected outcomes anchor the team to what they are driving toward. As the team then executes the work to get toward those outcomes, we have seen measurable progress in reasonable time. The PM must ensure there are clear lines of communication up, down, and across all lines for the success of the program/project. Issues do come up, but communication is key for resolution.

1) Freeze scope of work/feature - With a clear vision and scope is fixed. Everyone is clear, what to do and what is the expectation. 2) Agile methodology - Work in a agile manner so that deliveries can be faster and incremental in nature. 3) Automation - If there are repetitive tasks which needs manual effort and can be automated. We should automate as it will minimize the human errors. 4) Testing - Testing should be thorough and at multiple levels. Dev testing, integration testing, white box testing, black box testing etc.

The major outage caused by the Croudstrike patch, will billions lost in trade, patient lives endangered, trains and planes cancelled, makes one question the entire rational of using the internet, and why businesses are not going off net for critical systems. For almost 25-years I have been considered a Luddite by operating smart networks off the internet on secure private radio spectrum and not using IP protocols and architecture, delving half a billion messages per annum totally independent of the outside world, immune to cyber, power outages, cell phone coverage, etc. There is another way, as like my talk a few months back we should think of Safety Integrity Level SIL before investing in any IT systems.

Ensure you keep in mind the critical path of the project: does things that can either make or break the result. Make sure that dependencies are clear and properly prioritised. Reduce delays by keeping track of the highest risks and have mitigations in place.

From a leadership perspective, communicating your expectations, verify your communication to ensure expectations are understood, then follow up.

The speciation of Parallel Isolated and Autonomous Systems is the only way to ensure ?? % up time on any critical system. Scale the risk using a safety integrity type of approach looking at the cost of failure to fund investment in resilience. Where failure is not a option a triple redundant system is a must

Testing,testing and more testing.....ohh and incrementally in small iterative releases would be ideal! I hear you when you say "this should be part of SE release cycle" but there are two things some engineers hate doing testing and documentation, both are essential to achieve quality and improvement every time....