Since I entered the software industry, I have often seen that the project manager is not enough to ask people, whether it was a cmme consulting several years ago or back to the Enterprise for management, whether it was a customer who had consulted, it seems that the company currently works for is the same. The project manager reports a lot of problems and eventually comes down to "no one is doing anything, not enough people ", all of them are asking for resources from leaders and adding people! I am afraid this is also the most common phenomenon in software projects. But is it really helpful to add people? The company has two very "typical" projects and should be able to answer this question.
A project is a consulting project with a small contract amount. However, the company attaches great importance to it because it is the company's first consulting project and the company is expanding its business areas, however, the process and results of this project make our managers feel very ashamed. The project process is almost totally out of control, and people are constantly added. The result is a mess, it is like the "unfinished project" in the property market, and finally comes to the acceptance, it also consumes a bunch of people from the company to stay up all night to modify the low-level errors of the document. (See "Project Summary-Common Errors in documents" in the previous article) Although there are many objective and special reasons, it is hard to tell which person is responsible. However, it is a very important factor for me to blindly promise the project owner to add more people and not block the words. This is a quality management information system planning project. The output is a planning report. The customer is the Quality Assurance Department of Military Enterprises, and requires us to investigate their informatization status and propose construction plans. According to the original idea, this project should be almost the same for two people in six months. A business consultant can work as a project manager, and a System Architect is responsible for the preparation of technical documents. At the beginning, the arrangement was made in this way, but as soon as the staff was determined, they proposed that the quality informatization scope was large, requiring a wide range of talents, and the tasks were tight. Only two people were not enough. I discussed it with other leaders and analyzed the special characteristics of this project, that is, the company has not done quality management information system projects before. More people can also learn and exercise. However, there are some risks. In the business direction of quality management, there are three online people's experience and background in consulting, products, and R & D, however, each has its own understanding of the business, and no one can convince anyone. The company does not have an "authoritative person" in this regard. As a result, the related products have been moving slowly. I often lament that, I do not know when the truth will become more and more clear "? What should I do if I start a project? Facts have proved that our worries are not without reason. Even less, for various reasons, I was unable to control the project. Objectively speaking, although this project is small and its requirements seem simple, it is actually much more difficult. The project team needs to invest a lot of energy to learn new knowledge and get familiar with new businesses. The customers are also experienced people. When we encounter pressure on our side, we are panic. We hope that many people will come to study and discuss them together. The reasons for this seem to be incomparable, start to add 4 people, then 5 people, 6 people, and last until 7 people. I will write a planning report later based on this idea, and I will overturn it later. The people who participate in the report will write things that the previous people think will not work, however, the people mentioned above cannot tell where they are. The most terrible thing is that for a report with more than 160 pages and 8 parts, there is a correlation between each part. The more people involved, the more contradictions there are, the more difficult it is to be consistent. Because people have different understandings, quarrel, communication, mediation, conflict, mutual push, and rework have become the main themes of this project, that is, the customer cannot submit the draft at all times. It was supposed to be delivered by the end of last year, and it was barely accepted until May this year. The input-output ratio of this project is a big loss for the company. In addition, the project team was exhausted. in the later stage, all the colleagues who joined the project were eager to stay away from the project. The lessons learned from the failure of this project are profound. I can sum up many things. For example, similar project companies should not do this. For example, business operations should be more active, for example, if you don't want to ask external experts for guidance, it's a waste of time ,...... And so on. In terms of project management, there are a lot of loopholes, but I often think about it. What if such a project insisted on putting only two people at the beginning? The result is not necessarily better than it is now, but at least it is not worse than it is now, right? When so many people are added, will the actual work mainly depend on these two people? Do the two expect to depend on others? It is clear that no matter how hard it is to complete tasks with high quality, isn't it a mess to increase manpower?
