Delivery Team

I recently saw this list of delivery guidelines which any project team should adhere to. Not adhering to these will only lead to burning yourself and potentially projects

• Always identify you risks (technical are most important which you can take care of)
  
• Always start early coding (say after 2 weeks of project start. Sometimes it takes months for your team to configure project in a specific IDE and server)
  
• Risks are not only yours. Let your customer and other stack holders know about them. Risks include availability of resources and let responsible people know about it early.
  
• No process can help non performers or unskilled resources to write quality code. Competency development is the responsibility if others and running project can not training people from scratch so evaluate your resources properly and let people know that your are not going to do miracle with unskilled resources.
  
• Re estimate and don’t try to manage the things if estimate says more effort is required. No process or manager can make it possible to achieve 100 man days task in 80 man days. Let people know more effort is required and schedule will certainly be impacted if you don’t have extra resources.
  
• Be practical on colander. If an assignment requires 1 calendar year it can not be completed in 3 moths by just adding 3 times more resources.
  
• Without having requirements written and testing done (unit and system testing) no process can help you passing acceptance testing.
  
• Always include end users (business users) in requirements discussions and get their signoff also. No one except end users can give you and idea about their real requirements.
  
• Don’t expect end users to give you specifications. Give them early demo of wire frame, prototype or early code so that gaps can be filled before death.
  
• Delivery is the responsibility of delivery team not quality department so don’t expect much from processes. Quality and processes are support functions. Know your job better, plan it and do it. If your customer is happy everyone will be happy.