Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Priorities Inflation In IT Projects? 304
NetDanzr writes "I work for an IT company that has a steady stream of projects, new features to our existing products and technical support issues. As it is customary, though, our development resources are not sufficient to cover the amount of projects. As a result, our delivery dates are slipping, and as a result the average priority of projects is rising. Where the goal was to have only 10% of projects rated high, within a year nearly 50% of projects are rated as such. Our solution is to completely wipe out the project list once per year and start a new, properly prioritized list. How does your company deal with this inflation of priorities?"
Staff (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like you're honestly understaffed. If you guys are honestly working as hard as possible and things are still going unfinished then its not a problem of priorities - it's a manpower problem. Hire more people.
Re:Get a project manager. (Score:5, Informative)
Who/what is responsible for this?
1. Sales teams who put pressure on project architects for low costing.
2. Solution Architects who think each of their project member is Linus Torvalds.
3. Existence of bench resources. Idea is to underbid and deploy bench resources (unbilled) as anyway they are idle.
4. Unbilled bench resources suddenly getting deployed in new projects.
Re:Get a project manager. (Score:4, Informative)
This is somewhat appropriate here I think. Frequentlyt, Dilbert [dilbert.com] is on-target when management is not.
Re:Too many subject matters here (Score:4, Informative)
One of the problems w/ project management when one is bombarded w/ projects is that one has to have a continuous line of communication to the boss, which obviously means less time actually working. Oh, that, and meetings regarding the project as well. One solution is an online status tracking system that gives anybody an instant status level as to where in the project it's there. That way, one can determine where the bottleneck is, and work towards addressing it there.
Re:Get a project manager (Score:5, Informative)
Some companies have a group that only handles system-down and user complaints and other people handle the longer-term projects. Some companies have babysitters for upper management.
This.
You will be amazed how much more can get done on projects when you have dedicated Firefighers and Babysitters. Another helpful suggestion is to make sure that the Babysitters have teeth. Upper management is not going to care what IT processes are in place to keep the whole infrastructure from devolving into anarchy. They want what they want and they want it fast.
Make sure your babysitters are the best of the best, and make sure that they can affect immediate change in IT without having to go through the proper channels. If they need to open a port on the firewall then they should have the passwords and access to do so. If they need to have an account created make sure that they can log into the LDAP server and create one, etc...
So many IT people get angry about this claiming that they shouldn't get special treatment. Bullshit. They should get special treatment because they are the Upper Management, they are pretty damn special. You don't want them waiting and you don't want their IT requests to slow down the project guys at all.
Re:Babysitters/firefighters (Score:5, Informative)
Ye flipping gods- another one.
No. Just No.
Sarbanes-Oxley did NOT make it illegal to change production software in public companies. What it DID do was make it a requirement that the management of a company was legally responsible for the financial reporting of the company. So even if the financial reporting software had a problem, they are still on the hook for it. All the IT auditing firms got together and agreed that meant the FINANCIAL software needed to have all the changes be approved by the proper applications owners and that there needed to be an approval process, documentation, and all the other stuff that makes auditors (and no one else) happy.
Those same auditors have pushed that in order to avoid risk, EVERY software application should go through that same process even if it has nothing to do with finance. Risk-adverse management agreed. So now most public companies force Sarbanes-Oxley compliant processes on every bit of development, costing huge amounts of wasted time and money.
Skipping it doesn't mean it is illegal. It means that if your company is audited and a set of software is found to be the cause then it is possible the management might get fined. To the best of my knowledge, this has NEVER happened. And I feel comfortable saying it is unlikely to ever happen.