(^16) 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
Keep It Simple, Simon
Krishna Kadali, M. Tech
Kondapur, Hyderabad, India
STAKEholDERS oF ThE PRojECT often make things more complicated
than they need to be. This a common cause of software project failures. The
team members of the project must have the ability to completely visualize the
objectives of the project and complete actual work. Stakeholders, however, can
accomplish the project in several simple, magical steps in their own minds.
They imagine achieving the end solution quickly and easily, no matter how
complex it is.
Stakeholders should not build a software project as a monolithic, gigantic,
inflexible monster; instead they should allow the information technology
team to build it like an onion, with each layer enhancing its maturity. There is
no other alternative in the world of reality. Regardless of the completeness of
the requirements, there will always be change. If your software is not flexible
enough to quickly adapt to changing requirements, the project is dead even
before it has begun.
To keep things simple, following are the key points to keep in mind:
• Keep the requirements simple. The business analysts often confuse a par-
ticular solution that came to their mind with the actual customer require-
ment based on a business need. Although the real requirement may be
something very simple, there may be a communications gap between
business analysts and programmer/developers since neither really under-
stands what the other does.
Business analysts should write requirements using simple tree-based
imagery. The root requirement is the simple objective of the overall proj-
ect. Small twig sets of child-level requirements are grouped together to
form a branch representing a parent-level requirement. This process is