People
Adapted from lecture materials by David Root [1].
Software is designed, argued over and delivered by people, and the parts of a project that a schedule cannot describe are almost all human: who understands the problem, who is motivated to solve it, who talks to whom, and who decides. This area covers those parts — first why projects go wrong often enough to need managing at all, then the individual, then the group, then how either of them decides.
| Where to go | What it covers | Open it when |
|---|---|---|
| Why Projects Fail | The Standish CHAOS figures, what “success” means under two rival definitions, and why any published project statistic needs its provenance attached [2] | You need a number about project outcomes, or an argument for why management is needed |
| Personality | Technical people as a population: Paul Glen’s Leading Geeks archetype, MBTI and its evidential problems, national culture, and Goleman’s six leadership styles with the practice page beside them | You are working with one person, or deciding how to lead |
| Teams | What a team is and what predicts its performance, formation and the stage models, motivation and social loafing | You are working with a group rather than an individual |
| Decisions | How experts decide under pressure, how groups decide badly, which biases are actually established in software engineering, and what changes when the advice comes from a model | Something has to be decided, or a decision has gone wrong |
One habit runs through all three. Management claims arrive with numbers attached — 29% of projects succeed, a leadership style correlates .54 with climate, a personality type predicts performance — and the numbers are usually weaker than the sentence around them. Each page here states what its evidence is and what it is not, in a How solid is this? section near the foot. Read that section before you quote the page.
Acknowledgments
This page adapts material from lectures by Eduardo Miranda and David Root [1] on software project management.
References
- D. Root,Managing Software Development. Carnegie Mellon University / Innopolis University lecture series, 2014.
- The Standish Group International,“CHAOS Report 2015,” The Standish Group International, Inc., 2015.
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