I want to share my experience in conducting IT projects in a series of articles in which I will describe the most profound reasoning that I come across in the process of working and "excavating" the meanings of technologies, products and the minds of people involved at different levels of the industry.
Thinking about the benefits and safety of my observations, I quickly came to the conclusion that Habr is the best place for this kind of information. Perhaps my reasoning will lead someone to more complex and interesting matters, and we will all discuss how to implement them.
The first topic that I would like to touch on is the meta topic, so to speak. So my thoughts on IT project management:
Project Management - Systems and People
It is believed that the impact of the human factor and inconsistencies in management systems on the process and results of the project is difficult to predict. Market estimates vary as It is almost impossible to accurately measure the negative impact of a sprawling governance infrastructure.
According to my conservative estimates, 40% of the specialist's time is spent on eliminating communication and management inconsistencies.At the same time, the upper limit of downtime is practically unlimited. field work directly depends on the decisions of the management chain and the responsibility of other performers on the part of both the internal team of performers and external specialists (partners, vendors and representatives of the state bureaucracy), which indirectly affect the deadlines, capital and key resources of the project.
The scattering of resources on the part of the customer due to the lack of control at all stages of work leads to overspending and finally removes the ability to predict both the process itself and the results of work. The experience of project management specialists in the field of infrastructure suggests that it is extremely difficult to obtain high-quality audit results of a newly completed project, not to mention a planned and delayed audit.
Responsibility for the proper fulfillment of obligations at each stage of work is diffused among all project participants and, in fact, there is no one to ask, and the issues are resolved at the conceptual level.
As the scale of projects grows, there is an increase in the impact of the human factor and inconsistencies in management systems, technologies and tools.
The cult of "star" performers
Undoubtedly, there are specialists and teams in the technological world who have learned to partially deal with both internal and external chaos of projects. Through their fundamental experience in overcoming project difficulties, despite the lack of specialized support tools, teams of stars can intuitively predict what problems a project will face at various stages and provide a list of possible solutions.
Despite the presence of such experience among the "stars" of the market, often the experience itself is not formalized in any way and lives in the heads of individual specialists, which directly affects the possibility of its transfer and scaling. It takes dozens of years to gain such experience, but even the presence of formal signs and the "weight" of such experience does not allow adequately assessing the results at the exit, avoiding even basic failures, since a single specialist is not able to cover projects entirely with his intellect. At the same time, the key function of the project manager is avoiding failures and fulfilling formal signs, which does not guarantee a successful result.
«» . , , .“Average” performers and understandable professional growth do not exist.
The rest of the specialists, having initial or average personal experience and some methodological recommendations, are able to carry out a project only in ideal conditions, which are almost impossible to comply with. Their work is out of touch with the industry's conscious experience. When faced with obstacles, they do not have a systemic vision and experience in solving such problems.
Instead of trying to do everything possible on the part of the management to optimize and facilitate the work of specific specialists, interpersonal relations deteriorate, since a comprehensive solution to such problems lies outside the competence of both the management and technical specialists, and requires global interaction.
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Today, ideas about the qualifications of a specialist are not directly related to the relationship of the customer to his experience, but to the relationship to his appearance, formal features from the place of previous work, such as a position or the number of employees in subordination and other personal qualities not directly related to professional activities.
An ordinary specialist in this situation is trying to correspond to external attributes, and not to the functional content of his activities. Fighting the system in this case for him is a counter-productive and overwhelming task.
We hire those who, as it seems to us, most closely match the task profile in terms of external features (number of employees in subordination, work with specialized tools, etc.), but we have absolutely no idea what result this will lead to, i.e. .to. employees tend to exaggerate their competencies, "grease" missing arguments and blame their own shortcomings on the shortcomings of the project management system and the personalities of managers.
We are looking for a panacea, trying to hire specialists with more knowledge and experience than is needed for specific tasks. We spend more resources and time struggling with the lack of an understandable system of qualification confirmation and project management, which does not allow us to hire those who will perform the work with high quality in their segment and, at the same time, will not bring even more chaos to the existing project.
It doesn't have to be just stars.
The task of project management is to combine the ideal ideas of the customer and performers with reality.The described problems cause specific pain for all project participants: the customer, managers, technical and HR specialists, partners and suppliers of equipment and services.
The pain of management - the complexity of execution control and the lack of raw data
Project management, in fact, is drowning in the number of tools and data, but it is still extremely difficult to systematize and adequately evaluate the work done.
In this case, planning turns into a science from the category of esotericism, because we cannot predict either the timing, or the risks, or the costs of key project resources: human, capital, etc.
The key problem is the lack of trust in specialists and data on the work done. there are no methods of verification and systematization of data on the activities of specialists, incl. detailed reports on all required parameters. If such reports exist, then systematizing them and drawing up a "general" picture on their basis is the competence of an industry separately created for such tasks - audit.
At the same time, the final report drawn up based on the results of the audit may not reflect the real picture of what is happening. This is especially true for detailed reports. The more details, the more space for their interpretation.
The pain of performers is work outside the comfort zone and the lack of an understandable system of professional growth
Systems for recording experience and work performed in the corporate sphere exist, in fact, only for the management level and informationally limited due to the lack of data on the processes of implementing the stages from the standpoint of specialists.
As a result, it is extremely difficult for an ordinary specialist to concretize and prove his experience. That is why surety, references, autobiography, etc. are so important in the recruiting process. At the same time, we still begin to evaluate communications, not professional activities.
Since the processes and procedures are not documented, the amount of labor costs consistently exceeds expectations. specialists are forced to engage in both preparatory work and the elimination of shortcomings on the part of other specialists directly or indirectly involved in the project.Since experience and qualifications cannot be directly assessed, professional growth is difficult because is perceived through the prism of formal indicators in isolation from proven experience - certificates, exams and other documents that do not guarantee the implementation of the tasks in full.
An indirect and vague assessment based on the described indicators leads to the absence of clear development guidelines for specialists and the impossibility of their third-party reliable assessment.
The pain of recruiting - insufficient HR qualifications to assess the professional suitability of specialists
Hiring turns into a lottery because it is not possible to reliably predict what impact a specialist will have on a specific project. This entails an increase in labor costs in the hiring process (and, as a consequence, capital overruns for the work of HR specialists), since for a rough conclusion about a specialist, it is necessary to involve specialists in his field in the hiring process. This takes time and distracts specialists from working on the project.
As a result, there is a blurring of responsibility, and HR performs the functions of a secretary - it makes appointments, conducts an initial interview that does not touch on professional topics, etc.
HR is forced to perceive specialists from the position of a psychologist as personalities, but cannot perceive them as a tool for conducting effective activities.HR — , , ..
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Assessing and justifying the value of products today is the task of marketers who use any tricks in their work to convince decision makers who are actually cut off from the specifics of project implementation.
The lack of transparency of projects and the lack of mechanisms for anonymizing results for their subsequent transfer leads to the fact that marketing services speculate on the expectations and emotions of the customer, and do not operate on specific data about the use of products and services of their companies.
Goal-setting in the development of products and services is based on the expectations and emotions of the market, does not take into account specific tasks and, in fact, also represents an unfounded prediction of the future. Instead of an understandable and reasonable evolution, manufacturers are forced to follow trends and fashions that are often unrelated to reality.
Technological systems have a large number of components that are produced by various companies and service providers. Due to the complex nature of these systems, the certification and assessment of specialists due to the lack of a system for fixing experience does not guarantee both the successful execution of work and their reproduction and scaling in the future.
The presence of certificates and standards is a forced method of dealing with the current situation, but a reliable assessment of their effectiveness is impossible due to the described reasons.
The only visible way to solve the described problems is to combine data from different sectors of professional activity.Imagine that the average tech company has set a goal to translate their ideas and expectations of an ideal project into reality. What can the company do to achieve this?
Lock the project team and everyone who is at least somehow involved in the project (including initiators, executors and partners) in the room and force them to work out the methodology of project management? The result will be negative because In isolation from the process, the methodology will be, for the most part, erroneous, and will bring nothing but additional costs, since projects will be idle at this time.
Hire a team of stars? The result will be relatively positive, but the project will remain difficult to scale in the absence of specialists who, in fact, implemented the project itself. At the same time, with the transition of specialists, the experience will still be lost, and further support of the systems will return to the state of emergency work and liquidation of emergency.
To form a system for recording and transferring experience? This will be, at least, a non-core activity. And in the absence of a rigid conceptual apparatus due to the limited experience of both an individual company and a specialist, the output will be an unstructured result that will not allow reproducing qualitative results.
To be
continued I continue to reflect on this and other topics and will gladly answer your questions and constructive criticism.