It seems natural that a startup with a small team forego traditional project management in favor of delivering the product. However, at a certain scale, project management components start to become critical. For example, I expect that when well executed, following practices would save months of time:<p><pre><code> * Domain experts sign off on a plan to ensure success
* Stakeholders agree that their needs will be met
* Just enough design and estimation is done to plan around dependencies
</code></pre>
My question is, who out there is getting project management right? What does it look like inside the organization - what responsibilities do engineers, managers and product managers have in order for this to work? Has anyone seen a firm successfully adopt a culture of project management?
Capital P “Project management” is about control, and usually isn’t a value add in small orgs, unless you are managing subcontractors.<p>The best project companies that I’ve seen are in industries with clear scopes and good financial incentives to finish. The best single example was a consortium that finished an 18 month, $500M project 15 minutes early.
I have been trying to formalize a process at my organization.<p>I think unless it is ingrained in the culture, you are always going to have different people using different approaches.<p>Right now, better training is looking the most promising way to work towards better project management.