Speeding Up Technology Projects

Speeding up technology projects can be done in various ways. I feel that there can be two fundamental stumbling blocks: technological and managerial.

Technologically, I assume that the team has hired reasonably bright developers with a decent, if not perfect, understanding of programming basics. After that,the potential bottle-necks can be:

• reinventing the wheel: programmers spend way too much time doing stuff that is already done by somebody
• IDE: a good IDE can significantly speed up the speed of development
• poor testing

From managerial point of view, the main stumbling blocks can be:

• poor choice of technology
• poor choice of development methodology
• lack of focus on long-term vision with complete focus on speed

These may be self-evident to most of you who have had some experience in IT. Nevertheless, each point is much more complicated than it appears and merits some discussion.

These issues can come to haunt a team at any point due to the extremely dynamic nature of information technology. To be ever-vigilant is the only answer. What makes it especially challenging is the fact that many problems can persist themselves without making themselves evident for a long time; and by that time the rot has set in with a vengeance and changes are pretty hard to implement. In a series of articles I shall have a closer look at these issues in perspective of my experience and observations and chronicle the same. Please feel free to give your feedback and views wrt same.