Working with a software development company - why your project management matters

Effective project management is an essential part of any software development project and most software development companies will use a dedicated project manager to deliver the project on time and budget. Even small projects - just 1 developer - need someone to keep an eye on costs, progress and overall quality.

It also makes a sense for the client to have their own project manager - not necessarily a full-time Prince2 qualified project manager but someone from the client organisation who can put time into the project and understands the project management role.

Here are 5 reasons why - if you're about to commission a bespoke software development - you should seriously think about finding someone who can manage your project:

1. Manage internal stakeholders. It doesn't take long on a bigger project for different teams to begin to request slightly different features. There's a job to do to manage those requests and the people who make them. It’s also important to set expectations and begin to get people thinking about how the new software will affect them. Your project manager can drive that internal communication.


2. Agree the plan with the software development company project manager. Even small projects have important milestones. When are the requirements signed off? When does development finish and testing start? When does the client team need to be ready for acceptance testing? It's good to have someone on the client team who can agree those dates and then feedback to the internal team.


3. Organise reviews of the software as it's being developed, collate feedback and prioritise requests for changes. Your software development company will appreciate timely feedback from real users. Pulling together a user group and getting them to feed into the development at work in progress reviews is another job that can be picked by your project manager.


4. Get the your team ready for acceptance testing. Most reasonable size projects need several days of acceptance testing when development is finished. Test scripts need to be written - a non trivial job if you want to test a wider range of scenarios across the different user groups. And someone needs to collate results and feedback to the developers. Again, this job is hard to do well without some good client-side project management.


5. Develop an implementation plan and manage the roll-out. This is a seriously important job on a mission critical business system development. It's even more important to get this right if you've got groups of users who are key to the success of the project but who can - if they want to - refuse to use the software. Big projects with multiple project partners who already have their own internal systems and processes can require serious implementation and roll-out planning. A good internal project manager who can plan from the start to get stakeholder buy-in is essential.

Doing the project management role isn't difficult - but the role does need to be recognised in the project and it does need to be done by someone who has the capacity to take it on. The biggest risk is that it sort of gets forgotten and no one in the client team has any real responsibility for running the project on a day to day basis.