Stop the fancy talking; let's communicate!

CEO: Tell me, can we go live with the website this weekend? We’ve planned this several times already!

Project Manager: Well, the sprints are already finished and the deliverables did not meet the acceptance criteria. The data conversion was delayed by the integration interphase which got an error 404. Because of the multi-threaded databases, the team requires at least 200 story points to fix this without any warranty. The good news is that the servers are configured, so we can finally focus on the back-end, interphases and front-end.I don't think that this phase will take many sprints. We can do the testing perfectly just before release since we have only senior developers on board.

CEO: Does this mean a 'Yes' or a 'No'?

Above dialogue is a very common communication obstacle while working towards a company vision. Due to poor communication strategies of Non-IT Project Managers upfront, they start using google terminology that is not understandable.

Nowadays most of the Project Managers tell to have been IT developers in the past. A little down drilling about their past developing skills reveals their poor translation of business vision to IT implementations. Their developing skills were obtained by putting formulas in excel, which they consider developing skills.

Please do not be fooled about fancy terminology. If an experienced IT professional cannot explain it simple for you to understand, the most probably you are talking to an excel developer. Invest in hiring personnel with proven experience or feel the pain of having terminology professionals. One thing for sure; with terminology professionals you will hear more and more fancy terminology when approaching deadlines.

IT implementations requires multidisciplinaire teams and therefore is Technical IT Experience necessary when managing implementation teams. Team members need to be understood by the project manager and these managers should prioritize between needs in order to implement the vision on time.

Bottomline: invest in hiring professionals with proven IT experience. The multidisciplinary IT team requires a Project Manager with Technical IT experience in order to relate to the team challenges. Understanding the team challenges is the foundation to achieve deployments on time.

By Julian Diaz de Pool, MSc.

Test architect @ Rectia