3 Factors that make an Information Technology Project different from the other Projects

In this podcast, Ricardo about the main differences in management technology projects as compared to other projects.

Episode transcript

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes of PM podcast today. I like to share with you what are the main differences between an it project and a conventional Project. And then most of the time when I received this kind of question, my traditional and typical answer is that the roots, the, a sense of both projects are the same. You need to understand the scope. You need to understand the requirements you, we need to manage time, manage costs, manage people. Cool, but there are three things that makes and 90 Project, Y is different from the traditional once.

The first one is the life cycle we need to is that the timeframe of a Nike project is very, very different from a timeframe of construction, for example, or a new product development. It's very different because when we think about one year in the it sector, it's a long, long term. But when we think about one year in all your platform, Project may be, is the time for you to do, to make the basic engineer okay.

With a lot of people. So it's very, very different. And I'm, I'm not only talking about the project, but I'm talking also about the product. When you develop something, a new application, a new software, you need to understand that probably the life cycle is to three years. If it's not less, if you are working on mobile, mobile . But when we think about a traditional Projects, we are talking about product that can last four centuries, like building like mall, like an airport.

So its very different. So we need to understand that this time must be managed in a very different way because delays have a weak in the 90 Projects we have a much greater impact than the latest off on a one week in a 10 year, all your development project. The second thing we need to understand is that the communication pattern in the it Projects is different. Why? Because of course it Project is most of the time handle and executed by it.

People, people with a lot of awareness and the understanding about Technology. So this people are much more suitable to work in this it platform to communicate. So it's much more natural for them to use emails, social network, instant messaging, in order to speed up the communication process compared with the traditional. For example, if you are doing a new mining in a remote area, you cannot talk with your workers through email.

It's very different because it's much more heirarchical the process. In most of the time, you don't have this communication. You don't have internet and this people are much more suitable to that. So when you were thinking about it, Projects when you prepare the communications plan, you need to understand that for this kind of project, the use of this communication stools can improve a lot, your results of the work you were doing. So you need to understand that and the last but not least is what I'm calling the freedom of thought ID.

People are general much more liberal. It organizations are much less Iraqi. This freedom of thought. It's something that is part of the DNA of this. It Projects. So I T people are much more relaxing with time to arrive at work and time to leave. This is not, Oh, of course I'm making a general statement. Need to understand that this freed off thought it's a great announced will have challenging thinks when we talk about that Project environment first, it's great because it's create a huge incentive for innovation.

It creates a huge incentive to people, dedicate time to do what they like. But when I tell about the challenges is that, look, you need to deliver. At some point, it's not only making something fun, but also delivering something. And this was the place where techniques like scrum like a jail or helping a lot because they do your trying to play with them, freedom of taut in order to deliver.

So when you do your daily scram, when you do your incremental process, you are allowed and people to breathe and to think wild doing the work. The biggest challenge is its this is for sure, is that all of this kind of techniques they are based on not in a completely close the scope. So if a client is paying the fixed price for a price, not in an hour base, but it's paint for a fixed price.

So when you have a lot of changes in the scope, someone needs to pay for tat because of this, that it's so easy for us to fail in it Projects and because of the speed is so fast that you need to understand this balance. So it's very, very different. For example, when you go to a traditional construction projects, there is a very queer Yorkie, a mold of the people among the processes, extremely process oriented or otherwise the buildOn will collapse easily.

And the it sector does is quite different because most of the people, they think that one of the biggest assets of working in this kind of environment is the one, a freedom to innovate. So you need as a project manager to understand this balance and that at the end, you need to understand that every single project with every single team is something unique. And you need to understand this. And if you understand the lifecycle, if you, this communications partner in, in this freedom of thought, you can manage better in succeed more or with your ID.

Project if you're a listening to this podcast and you do not work with it, it's great because maybe your own work can bring to us different aspects that you need to consider to make our project successful. Its not one size fits all. We cannot work like that because this will drive us to fail. Think about that and see you next week with the, not a five minutes BM Podcast.

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3 Factors that make an Information Technology Project different from the other Projects

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