As a project manager, you may already know the answer to the article title. At times, my articles are intended to help those who are interested in project management and want to know more about how project management works and see if it is the right field for them and also helping new project managers get up to speed in terms of process and tactical steps. At times, these articles are also intended to help increase the knowledge of readers who come to the site to learn about project management in general.
If you are creating a project plan for the very first time, this is the article for you! I want to explain why following tasks in an order is important. Just like baking a cake or doing an oil change, you have to follow steps in a certain order to make sure that the task is completed successfully. The same applies in project management. If you go and code the software before finishing the requirements process, then you may create a “half baked” solution (ok, no more cooking puns). When it comes to project management and developing your first project plan, you have to understand the cycle of work that you are working to achieve. Below, I have put together the points in order that should be taking when focusing on Information Technology (IT) Project Management. The rules can be similar to other types of project management, but there may be nuances to consider as each industry takes project management methodology and makes adjustments to match what the industry should follow.
- Requirements: within IT projects, you must know what you are creating up front for a waterfall project. A waterfall project is a typical IT project that build a solution one phase at a time. The “opposite” of a waterfall project is an agile project. In agile projects, the requirements, design and development are all done within the same “sprint”, which is a 2-4 week cycle of work. I kind of went off track here as to explain the difference between a waterfall vs. agile project. My point here is that before you go and make an IT solution, you need to know what the business requirements and issues that you are trying to solve for in terms of what the customer really needs.
- Design: After the requirements are determined, it is important to build the functional and technical designs. The functional design means utilizing the business requirements to show how the system will look/feel, and how the system will flow throughout various processes. In an ERP IT project, this is also where configurations are determined and how the system will work for the business and end users. If you decide to start the design before finalizing the requirements, then any requirement changes that occur may impact both the functional and technical design. The technical design is typically the technical approach that will be taken to build out the IT solution, whether it’s the logic that is being considered and/or the look and feel from a technical/coding standpoint.
- Development: Development of the IT solution will start once the functional and technical designs has been finalized. This is a step where the developers will be coding the solution to make sure it meets the requirements, functional design and technical design. For an out of the box ERP solution, the technical developers may need to create RICEW (reports, interfaces, conversions, extensions/enhancements, workflows) to meet the customer’s requirements. For a customized solution, everything will be developed from the ground up in terms of the solution. Development is a key step as it is important for the project manager to regularly check in with the development team to make sure that they are staying on track, building the solution that is intended, and bringing the customer along the way so that they also understand the progress.
- Test: Testing usually starts once the development aspect is complete. There are several types of testing that can be done for IT solutions. Testing can include regression testing, functional testing, end-to-end testing, performance testing, unit testing, smoke testing, integration testing, interface testing, volume testing, user interface testing, negative testing, and many other types. The basic purpose of testing the IT solution is to make sure that it can suit the needs of the users and take on all of the common business scenarios that the users would face in a day to day setting. These types of testing would be based on the requirements that were finalized in the first phase of an IT project and the most common business scenarios would be built around this. In addition, it is important to test the negative scenarios to make sure if the opposite of a business scenario is performed, the solution does not accept these values as true and processes into the system.
- UAT: UAT, or User Acceptance Testing, is when the business users who gave the requirements to the IT team initially, will come into the system and test the system end to end based on their day to day work activities. This will involve the business users testing all types of scenarios from and end-to-end perspective and making sure that the system processes the
- Deploy: Deployment is one of the last steps in terms of finishing an IT project. This is the phase where all testing by the users have been completed, the solution works as it is intended to work, and can be deployed to the business and be used on an operational basis for the organization. The steps for deployment typically involve figuring out when to stop using the existing solution (if there is an existing solution), setting up the new solution in a Production environment, deploying the data into the system for the period requested, conducting smoke testing on the system to confirm that its operational for the respective business users.
- Operate and Maintain: Operate and maintain steps occur after the solution has been deployed to the users for operational usage. Operate and maintain step involves making sure that the solution continues to work as expected, resolving any issues (typically major issues) that occur while utilizing the system and resolving any errors that may come up. This is usually a 2 to 4 week period, depending on the type of support the customer is seeking.
I hope you found this article helpful. If you are interested in other areas or topics, please email me here.