Project Management 101 : The Need

The Need: It doesn’t mater the size of your IT shop, users will always need your services, if it’s a simple macro for a spreadsheet or a full blown system.

In order to satisfy the “customer” you need to understand his needs and this obligates you and your team to know the business. If you are unable to have a good understanding of the business then you can’t understand the need and most importantly, you can’t understand the impact this new development will have.

As an example, I was once approached because an application was needed to help reduce the time it took to create a given report. The solution was simple, take the original spreadsheet, dump it in SQL and then run the report with the filters in the SQL. But knowing the business, the real problem was not the report, it was the data itself. So the real solution was to take the original data source, the one that was used by several people for reporting and load this data into SQL.

This solution not only helped the department that came to me, but also helped two other departments.

You need to take time, understand the problem, what it means, who and what it impacts, is it a real problem? Or is the problem the way things are done? Is this a simple isolated thing? Or is it part of a bigger problem and need to be taken care of as a department/company wide application.

The other detail regarding the “customers” needs is that there is a big difference between WANT and NEED. Users rarely know what they need, but they are convinced of what they want. The trick is to turn the wants into needs. To do this, you need to spend some time understanding the requirements of the project.

The next post will cover the requirements.

George,

The Captain.