Learn About Technical Project Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the goals of technical project management.
- List the characteristics of the waterfall and agile project management methodologies.
- Explain the importance of technical project management.
- Describe how technical project management intersects with security.
What Is Technical Project Management?
You just heard the big news. The corporation you work for, which manufactures scientific products, just won a contract to develop a new medical device. You’re the technical project manager who will develop the software that will be used in the device. You’ve got that big win glow. And naturally, a touch of butterflies. As a technical project manager, you’re skilled as both a tech guru and an inspiring leader, and you can’t wait to organize everything and everyone to reach the goal of delivering the required software on-time, within budget, and to the required specifications. You’re excited to motivate your team to reach these goals! As skilled as you are, it’s your first big technical project in a while, and you want to deliver a product your customer loves.
Though “project management” has become a popular term in the last several years, it has been around for a long time. People have been undertaking projects since the earliest days of human activity, from the great pyramids of Egypt, to the Great Wall of China, and the moon landings of the 20th century. Of course, not all projects are as large and complex as these, but the components are the same.
As a technical project manager, you must balance between the roles of project manager and technical advisor. Technical project management is the process of planning, scheduling, and managing IT and IT-related projects. You conceive, develop, and execute projects.
Every project includes these general phases and high-level tasks.
- Developing requirements, objectives, and deliverables for the project.
- Planning the project and documenting requirements.
- Researching and evaluating technology options and weighing the cost/benefit when making purchases and other decisions.
- Building the project by overseeing code development and site configurations.
- Managing tasks, milestones, status, and allocation of resources within an established time frame and budget.
- Transitioning the solution to the maintenance team for support once it’s deployed.
- Identifying and communicating risks to stakeholders.
- Defining risk mitigation strategies.
Project phases aren’t always linear. Phases can overlap and repeat—especially if you work in sprints, a feature of agile project management methodology we cover in more depth later. What you learn in this module can apply to all project management methodologies.
Technical Project Management Methodologies
There are many different types of project management methodologies, but the two you probably hear about most often are waterfall and agile. Let’s take a closer look at what each of these methodologies entails.
Waterfall Methodology
In this methodology, tasks flow down the list in a sequential order, just like a waterfall (hence the name). A team must complete one step before starting the next. This is a more traditional approach to project management that is typically used on large infrastructure development projects. It’s a straightforward approach, but teams that need to change their plans as the project progresses may find the method limiting. Because it focuses on planning the entire project at the beginning, making adjustments midstream can be difficult.
Agile Methodology
This methodology allows teams to be flexible in identifying priorities and specifications for end products, allowing changes to product requirements whenever necessary. Teams using this approach seek to quickly and consistently provide products to consumers, facilitating rapid production cycles. Rather than waiting for the entire project to finish before presenting it to the customer, common in waterfall, teams define and produce a minimally viable product (MVP) that is released early on, and then iterated on in future development cycles. To do this, teams work in short sprints, with each sprint focusing on new features.
As the technical project manager, you work with a scrum master to track the progress of each sprint. The scrum master quantifies each of these sprints as small deliverable units of 2 to 4 weeks of work. Each month, the team reprioritizes in an effort to meet customer demand. This helps increase responsiveness to changes in requirements and the marketplace. Agile is typically used for small, fast projects, such as product development or features work.
Summary of the Methodologies
Waterfall and agile are not mutually exclusive, and some technical project management approaches use a combination of both. For example, you may use the waterfall methodology to confirm that the customer understands and approves of the solution’s scope and design. You may then use the agile methodology for the actual software development to ensure your team selects the most important work first, finishes it, then moves on to the next task. Whether you employ one of these methodologies, a mixture of the two, or another one entirely will depend on the project and your organization’s culture. In general, agile projects are more the norm today than waterfall, but both methodologies are still used and many organizations combine the best of both methodologies.
The Importance of Technical Project Management
All aboard! Open the doors to the technical project train and welcome your team. As a technical project manager, you have a key role to play in collaborating across the organization with a variety of stakeholders to securely reach your destination. Let’s take a closer look.
Evin, a software engineer, will help develop the code necessary for the medical device software you’re developing to function properly. Next to board the train is Priya, your data scientist, who will help develop the analytics necessary to make your software project a success. These roles may be filled with in-house resources, or contracted out.
Other stakeholders you’ll work with include business analysts, who will help document the processes, systems, and business models and integrate them with the technology you are building. As the technical project manager, you are the glue holding the business and technology teams together. You may find that you are communicating the necessity for changes to business stakeholders more often than working with your technical teams.
Let’s review the stakeholders we have on board.
- An experienced project manager.
- A software engineer with medical software experience.
- A data scientist with analytical skills.
- A business analyst to help us connect the dots to the business requirements.
There’s one other group of stakeholders it’s key to include in the project from the beginning: the security team.
Technical Project Management and Security
As a technical project manager, it’s crucial that you work with your organization’s security team early and often to put in place a rigorous security testing process at the beginning of the project. You will include security requirements from the first sprint, and include them in testing for each sprint. You will also include the security team in the decision making process to define an MVP. This mitigates the risk of schedule variance in scrambling to include security features on the back end, because you’ve baked security into the whole project right from the kickoff.
Technical project management is so important because you are the bridge connecting the information security function and the business units, ensuring technologies are both secure and meet user needs. Establishing transparent processes will help an organization’s security team work seamlessly with the various business units. Depending on your organization’s structure, culture, and maturity, it may take work to gain alignment between these two functions. Your job is to help the team think through how to design products and processes that are secure by default, and empower users to accomplish their tasks securely.
Now you understand a bit more about what technical project management is. In the next unit, you learn more about the responsibilities of a technical project manager, and discover the skills that help technical project managers succeed.