When faced with a very large or long project, do you modify your project management practices? Please give examples.
Trevin Chow said:
At Microsoft there are a variety of software development methodologies imposed, varying from waterfall, iterative waterfall and even agile methodologies like SCRUM.
Many teams will vary the type of methodology depending on the size and complexity of a project but as we ship more frequently, agile development models are taking over. These are ideal in majority of the cases since it deals with changing/evolving business requirements so well.
Robin Hornby said:
Larger projects always need more management, more use of formal techniques (eg earned value), more discipline and more communication efforts. This is exemplified by ROT (rule of thumb) I use successfully to estimate PM effort rising from 10% (F/T PM for a team of 10) increasing to as much as 35% (suggesting large management team, large admin support needed for teams of 50, 100 and more). I am a little leery going any further, however, as the researchers only seem to consider a project large when it hits 2400 p mths. (that’s a hundred working for 2 years!). I fear I know many projects not even close to that, that are considered large and frequently get into trouble. And I also know from my experience that small projects (a team of 5 or less working for 6 months) seldom get into trouble. Maybe we need more information on this study – starting with the definition of “failure”. Robin Hornby.
William Ng said:
Similar to Microsoft, there are are several "flavors" of project methodologies that are to be employed for project of different size and duration. Longer term projects are more likely to be splited into phases where deliverables are delivered in different periods of time according to corporate priorities where we have found to allow for better control of deadlines.
