Project plan. A fancy term we all like to use. But believe it or not, most of us don’t even know what a project plan really is.
I don’t know why, how and when it came to be that in IT we started using the term project plan, but whatever the origin, the term we use is somewhat incorrect, and when attached to what we often attach it to, it’s downright wrong.
Take that project you are currently running, and imagine, just for a second, that it came with only 3% budget overrun. Most of people in software industry would call it wild success.
In motion picture industry, however, trampling measly 2% or 3% over initial budget would be considered a failure.
While movie industry and software industry are seemingly light years apart, there are many things these two have in common, and there are obviously many things we can learn from them.
Many project management authorities assert that from project management stance all projects are equal. I dare saying that some projects are more equal than others.
In my last post, I argued why I believe software (and ERP) projects are different. But something came to my mind today, and it’s really an important differentiator of ERP projects from other kinds of projects.
“Software projects are no different from other projects”.
This statement is being repeated over and over at project management courses and seminars, even endorsed in books.
It’s true that software (and ERP implementation, as a subset of software) projects have many traits in common with projects in other disciplines. But ignoring their specifics is almost as wrong as saying that software projects are completely different than other projects.
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