| • | Strategic Planning, Leadership and Management - Setting project development objectives and ways to achieve these objectives; leading and managing the project development process. |
| • | Research and Development (R&D) - Collecting information about and understanding customers needs and wants and ways to implement these needs and wants. |
| • | Finance - Ensuring that sufficient financial means for the project development are available in a timely manner. |
| • | Operations - Application production and service providing (maintenance and updates). |
| • | Marketing - Making sure that as broad customer base as possible is aware of the new product or service features and benefits. |
| • | Sales and Customer Service - Actively selling the new product or service features and benefits to the existing and prospective customers. Ensuring that the customers new product and service usage related needs are met as feasibly as possible. |
| • | Human Resources - Ensuring availability of people who are proficient at carrying out all the project development tasks. |
| • | IT - Ensuring that the right technology is available, functions as needed and produces the needed results. |
The above list reflects the administrative side of the project development and management.
Sometimes only some parts of this side - namely Management/Strategic Planning, R&D and Operations - are being addressed adequately by project developers and managers. For example, project developers and managers may focus primarily on deciding whether to use predominantly predictive or agile application development strategy, and which production tasks to outsource and which ones to handle within the company.
However, that's not enough.
If nobody acts as a marketing person who is able and willing to communicate to the application's future users what the application's features and benefits are, an otherwise good project may fail.
Further, marketing is usually most successful when done strategically and repeatedly. Once the new application's development process is in the production stage, marketing activities should coincide with the production-related work.
So, this may require budgeting for the necessary activities and making sure that the relevant activities are carried out at suitable intervals and in an otherwise feasible manner.
Similarly, skilled professionals have to sell the new product or service features and benefits to the existing and prospective customers. Further, as applicable, skilled professionals have to ensure that the customers new product and service usage related needs are met as feasibly as possible.
Both marketing and sales must be done ethically. Creating unrealistic expectations can kill an otherwise good project, just like not meeting realistic expectations can ruin it.
It should also be noted that R&D is distinctly different from marketing and sales. Companies can and should market and sell their expertise to the potential and existing customers. However, once the application development company starts doing users needs and wants analysis, no solution should be marketed or sold to the users until the users needs and wants analysis stage has been completed and the customer has agreed to a specific solution.
Comparison to running a small business is applicable here, because people who handle project development and management tasks usually have to wear many hats.
Industry professionals are familiar with every aspect of the above list. So, it's nothing new - except, perhaps, that IT projects can and should be addressed from this prospective. The most useful part of running projects by keeping this list in mind is that if any part of this list is left unaddressed, it is very likely that the unaddressed areas will come and bite the project manager at some point from you know where.
