Development Projects – A Confusion of Terminology

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MS
MShttps://dittodigital.co.uk
The author spent the first part of her career working in IT and IT Project Management in the oil industry and investment banking on complex global projects involving the management of outsourced project teams. She now runs a digital marketing company with particular expertise in technical SEO and Content Marketing.

I was recently reading some project management articles for inspiration when I came across one about project management in a development environment. Naturally, having an IT and a project management background I just assumed the article would be about software development. After all what other type of development is there?

Well it didn’t take me long to realise the article was actually about building housing developments and the particular skills and experience a project manager needs for those types of project. But that got me thinking about the similarities and, perhaps more importantly the dis-similarities between IT development projects and any other type of project.

Fans of the Agile method of running software development projects (and I count myself one of them) like to assert that the method is suitable for many other types of projects but let’s take building a housing as one example for comparison.

Certainly with software you can plan a bit then produce something to show to the stakeholders – it may be a prototype or one small component of the overall software package. Often these prototypes or stage products in an IT project can look quite impressive (note the word look as they are often not very substantial when put to the test). And the feedback they generate can then be used to make modifications and improvements to the next stage of development and delivery.

But how in practise would this approach work when building a house – I have images in my mind of a cardboard house painted to look like brick but somehow don’t think it would look that impressive. Or maybe build just one room with proper construction materials – somehow I am not convinced. The arguments for the Agile method would still hold true – the client could see the bricks, windows and internal finishes of the single room but in practise (to have delivered it rapidly) it probably would need to be demolished and rebuilt with solid foundations and a proper roof. That might not be too bad if the one and only next stage was the whole house but that isn’t quite how Agile projects work – they are iterative – and the analogy of building first one room, then two, then three and so on, demolishing each in between is laughable.

So I am a fan of Agile but only for IT projects – when it comes to the majority of other projects the good old traditional, linear methods still studied on most project management training courses are here to stay.

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Project management has developed into a fully-fledged chartered profession since the granting of the Royal Charter in the UK to The Association for Project Management (APM) in 2017. Training courses for project managers were already available and highly popular to help people gain professional project management accreditation, but with this wider recognition of the profession it is now seen as a desirable career path for many. Whilst the APM has the coveted Royal Charter and continues to develop its APM PMQ (formerly the APMP) programmes, there are also other internationally recognised qualifications that continue to be highly regarded such as PMP and PRINCE2.

Organisations have become increasingly project-focused in this era of rapidly emerging new technologies and they value the expertise that comes with experienced and fully qualified project teams and managers. By investing in their project management capability businesses can be confident of delivering their new projects in time and on budget more often and more successfully. Many major corporation are now training their people to have the right project management qualifications as well as relevant experience, through internal Learning & Development (L&D) programmes; or by using external project management training providers.

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