Distributed Development (Part 1) - Bruce F. Webster: Down-to-Earth Management
(
Page 3 of 3 )
Finally, there’s the down-to-earth issue of management.
If
you’re the manager for a distributed IT project, how do you manage your
personnel successfully? How do you know what they’re doing and how they feel
about it? I’ve managed groups of developers on large, long-term projects; you
need to be able to walk around and talk to each developer regularly and
casually.
Again, picking up the phone or sending e-mail is not the
same as a quiet (or not-so-quiet) heart-to-heart in a private office or
conference room.
Good team management can make a significant difference in a
project’s success or failure, and it’s not as though IT engineers are the
easiest group in the world to manage (the joke about “herding cats” was around
for at least a decade or two before someone made a commercial about it).
Distributed development makes management just that much harder.
In short, distributed development is hard, and a lot of
projects founder because of those difficulties. Next week, we’ll talk about
some successful real-world techniques of distributed development that may help
you make it work in your own projects.
Bruce
F. Webster is an international IT consultant. You can reach him at bwebster@bfwa.com or via his Web sites at brucefwebster.com and bfwa.com.
© 2008 Bruce F. Webster
IT Management 
