Gestion de Projet

Patterns

Leviathan--Software development projects are mysterious beasts, too deep and swift for a manager to fully understand or document. How do you know what to control directly, and what to leave to your developers?
Geek Channeling--You are responsible for keeping your team in the corporate loop and from spinning in random directions.
Tribal Language--Understand the cryptic and sometimes evasive language of developers so that you can have some insight into the substance of what is being said.
Overtime Detox--Oppose the temptation of overtime. Resist pressure to compress schedules without corresponding feature reduction, staff increase, or both.
The Gauntlet--Apply a legal-like standard of probable cause to investigate slackers and other problematic team members.
Train Hard Fight Easy--Despite the expense and time, train the team as a unit in relevant technologies to give everyone the same tools and language and so that the team is not using the project itself as the primary learning experience.
Fall on the Grenade--No matter who is at fault, take the responsibility for solving a serious problem in the project. Stand up and take the heat when the problem is unrecoverable. Then, move on.
Unique Place--Make your work environment unique, inspirational, and fun, so that you can retain your most talented employees. Think about perks, physical space, and entertainment.

Management needs to put a business person in charge of getting the best set of features done by the date. In XP, we call that person The Customer.

How are things going?: The best way to inform management of how things are going is to speak in terms of their interests. Their interests are time, resources, and features. As developers, we're in charge of the features. Therefore, let's report, frequently (no less often than monthly) in terms of fully implemented, truly available, running, tested features. There will surely be need for more information than this, but in my opinion, reporting in terms of running tested features is our most powerful single move.

What control can we give them?: The best way to give management and our customer a sense of control is to work on whatever features they deem important, based on planning sessions held, again, no less often than monthly. We're a washing machine, so we get to say how big the load is. But we'll wash whatever they put in.