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CHAPTER 3 PROJECT MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS 59

2. Project (technical) managers who must plan, motivate, organize, and
control the practitioners who do software work.

3. Practitioners who deliver the technical skills that are necessary to engineer
a product or application.
4. Customers who specify the requirements for the software to be engineered
and other stakeholders who have a peripheral interest in the outcome.
5. End-users who interact with the software once it is released for production
use.
Every software project is populated by people who fall within this taxonomy. To be
effective, the project team must be organized in a way that maximizes each person’s
skills and abilities. And that’s the job of the team leader.
3.2.2 Team Leaders

Project management is a people-intensive activity, and for this reason, competent
practitioners often make poor team leaders. They simply don’t have the right mix of
people skills. And yet, as Edgemon states: “Unfortunately and all too frequently it
seems, individuals just fall into a project manager role and become accidental proj-
? What do we ect managers.” [EDG95]
look for
when we select In an excellent book of technical leadership, Jerry Weinberg [WEI86] suggests a
someone to lead a MOI model of leadership:
software project?
Motivation. The ability to encourage (by “push or pull”) technical people to
produce to their best ability.
Organization. The ability to mold existing processes (or invent new ones) that
will enable the initial concept to be translated into a final product.
“In simplest terms, Ideas or innovation. The ability to encourage people to create and feel cre-
a leader is one who ative even when they must work within bounds established for a particular soft-
knows where he ware product or application.
wants to go, and
gets up, and goes.” Weinberg suggests that successful project leaders apply a problem solving manage-
John Erskine ment style. That is, a software project manager should concentrate on understand-
ing the problem to be solved, managing the flow of ideas, and at the same time, letting
everyone on the team know (by words and, far more important, by actions) that qual-
ity counts and that it will not be compromised.
Another view [EDG95] of the characteristics that define an effective project man-
ager emphasizes four key traits:
Problem solving. An effective software project manager can diagnose the
technical and organizational issues that are most relevant, systematically struc-
ture a solution or properly motivate other practitioners to develop the solu-
tion, apply lessons learned from past projects to new situations, and remain