Sunday, January 09, 2005

My project and Project Management (?)

Now why this question mark after project management. To give some background for this blog first. Had our appraisals this week. Pretty okay kinds. Had a long discussion with my manager on the way the project has proceeded. Said I am not particularly happy about the way our project has been managed (if at all it was "managed"). As expected he did not agree to what I was saying. But was able to convince him that we have made some terrible mistakes! Just thought of putting my thoughts on paper (??).
As a company I would have liked to get some learnings from the other implementations we have already done. Instead what we have here is learnings from tons of mistakes we have made ourselves. I could have done the same being in my previous company, what advantage does being in a company reputed for the "process" gives me? Nothing at all. May be this project is an exception! may be not...
EAI projects normally do not require huge amount of designing and technical skills just the right approach and tracking.
approach is to get learnings from all projects, look at the landscape of the client, apply the learnings there. This is how you can give value to the client. Not just taking whatever the client asks and dumping poor quality (both code and design) implementations, then do the patchworks to please the client (Man am I sick of this!).
Tracking is another important thing I found missing. How do we track projects? Project plans, you cannot expect a person with 6 months of experience to come out with a plan for execution. This is the task of the managers. If there is no plan how do you expect anything to be done correctly.
My manager says, you should take care of the dependencies, think proactively and all big fundas. Are we doing this as a company? I dont think so. Are we thinking about long term relationships with the client. Negative! Past one and half year of association with our company has not given any value add to the client(talking of value add, has it got even value for its money, let alone "add" part!) They seem to have lost trust and confidence in the so called solutions we provide.
Why am i so concerned of all this? I am growing in this company very fast, being the first one from the batch to go onsite, withing one year of being here for a long term, Getting recognitions like star of the month, Most valuable player, and promotion and salary hike and...
This is not the reason I came here! My purpose is not getting served here. Am not learning anything, neither technical neither managerial. Seems time has come to get lost from here....