Effective Software Project Management

Part Four: Iterative ESPM

The Iterative approach is your first departure from the comfortable world of the Linear and Incremental approaches. Here you step out into the unknown. For the first time you encounter a project whose goal is known and clearly documented, but whose solution is not. The desired functionality is known and documented but some of the features behind that functionality are only vaguely known and may not even all be identified. They must be discovered, and it is only by doing the project that that discovery will take place. While this may seem like a minor difference and not worthy of a new approach, such is not the case. These types of projects bring to the project manager quite a number of risks and issues. How to handle them in the most effective and efficient way is the subject of this part.