a project's minimum person is the project's maximum
This year i got a chance to work on a small IT consulting firm. Despite handling lots of projects, which is roughly around 5 projects every month, the company retain it's size by 20 - 25 people only. If we do a quick math, that will be 4 - 5 persons per project. Now I'm going to share how we did it with limited resources and budget.
Case Study
Most of our clients are requesting for exclusively designed app for their companies, whether it is to be used for external users or by the people inside the company itself. Let's take this example for our case study.
Assuming that the deal has been signed, and we only need to consider the project management, there are a few process in order to satisfy their needs:
- Requirement gathering
- Requesting timeline
- Create mock ups
- Publish the approved requirement documents to client
- Develop and launch requested applications
- Publish application documentations
In order to do all that, we will need people to manage each process.
Roles
Business Analyst
Business analyst is the person who gathers all the business requirements from clients. This people tends to have a little knowledge on IT or whatsoever, however have a deep understanding or hands on experience on wherever the field our clients run, in this case, insurance.
Their tasks will be something like this:
- Gather all requirements from the client
- Communicate feature's implementation to developers and designers
- Sometimes, give possible solution to the client (you know, you have that client who doesn't really understand what's going on and keep asking impossible requests)
System Analyst
The next step will be determining how to handle those requirements from the client. This person usually got lots of technical experience, therefore he/she should be able to translate the requests into possible implementation which will be developed later.
System analysts job description would look like this:
- Create an architecture diagram
- Create a database relationship diagram
- Liaise developers with client if a problem occurs
- Publish technical documents
UI Designer
The sole purpose of a UI designer in this project management is to create mock ups and assets, which is usually less time and energy consuming. Therefore, it will be a waste to assign someone to be a dedicated designer for a small project. In order to handle this matter, we put someone who can do both designing and developing app (client side) instead. But, in order to make it clear, I will explain their job descriptions separately.
This is what UI designers most likely do:
- Create wire frame
- Design mock ups
- Design assets (pictures, icons, etc)
Front End
After going into development stage, developers will start working to develop the application. We put front end developers responsible for the client side developments, whether it's mobile or web, user applications or a CMS. Therefore, this position is very fit to be merged with UI designers.
Front end developers' responsibility:
- Develop responsive client side applications
- Deploy app to server (or Play Store)
Back End
This is the guy who will do most of the code. Starting from database, server side development, to managing servers. Usually this is the go to guy in our office when someone encounter some problems. Regarding the workload, we assign someone dedicated for this position only.
His/her responsibility look something like this:
- Develop server side code
- Manage databases
- Manage servers and setting up their environments
- Deploy apps to production
Quality Assurance
During the development stage, there should be someone who should make sure the application runs well. That person it the quality assurance. Since, testing the application requires a good knowledge of the business process itself, this job can be done by business analyst.
Roughly, his/her job looks like this:
- Create a test case document
- Report bugs to developers
Project Manager
Project manager is the head of the project. This person needs to manage people, distribute tasks, and keep the deadline achievable. Therefore usually it is not wise for a project manager to get involved in technical activities, apart from creating documents. But, if on a tight budget, a project manager could also be a system analyst.
What project managers do:
- Lead and oversee the project from a to z
- Managing resources and task
- Participating in all tender processes
Summary
To sum it up, a small project may be tricky to handle. That's why allocating the correct man power based on the tasks and budgets needs to be handled with care, as this may save you lots of money. Our company uses this approach whenever we manage a project.