5.3 Soft Project Management Activities

A key activity of project management is to manage the people on the team ensuring that they work together effectively and that the personal career goals of each team member are being met. People management is the act of organizing, monitoring, coaching, and motivating people in a manner that ensures they work together well and contribute to a project/organization positively. From our experience, one of the most important lessons that you can learn is that people aren't interchangeable parts. Every single person has a different set of skills, experiences, strengths, and weaknesses.

Good software comes from people. So does bad software.

When you stop to think about it, software developers are paid to solve problems, and in "Habits of Productive Problem Solvers" (August 1999, Section 5.5.14), Larry Constantineprovides advice for doing so. An effective project manager understands that the best problem solvers learn the tacit logic of creative problem solving, whether they are conscious of the axioms and rules of this logic or not, and that they will often follow strategies that seem strange at first. Effective problem solvers avoid spinning their wheels by recognizing that they're doing so and then choosing to do something else often starting with brainstorming or blankfilling. Some people, when presented with a tough problem, often choose to "sleep on it" in the hopes that they will awake the next morning with a new idea or fresh approach. The lesson to be gained from this article is that...