Project Management

Hey Dev.to,

I have found myself in an interesting and challenging spot in my career.

I have been doing web development for about 4 years now, but I have never worked with a team. Now I find myself in a position where I am going to be the only full time developer working with two part time/casual developers remotely, to create a business "Portal" that will be used by four companies across Australia and New Zealand that needs to encompass many business areas like Employee Management, Asset and Incident Management/reporting, Sales force targets etc.

I have been maintaining and extending our current portal, but it is only for one company. I really don't feel I have the skill for this project, and the fact that I am going to be the only full time developer working on building this complex system to be used to run and manage four businesses across two countries is stressing me out. In particular, having never worked in a team I have no idea how to manage this project.

Do you have any recommendations for books or resources I could make use of to learn how to manage software projects on a larger scale?
I suspect this project will fail due to unrealistic expectations, but I want to give it my best shot.

Comments

[Savas Vedova]

I've been working with 30+ developers over the past two years. Here are some points I'd like to share:

• We have daily meetings for 5-10 minutes to sync with the team. I like these a lot because you always keep in sync.
• Remote friendly environment (I love this)
• We used to use trello, but the management team decided to switch to Jira. I prefer trello as Jira is very slow to me
• We now work in a scrum methodology but I'm not a big fan of estimating tasks. What I loved was our previous structure, where we had an half an hour meeting on mondays to plan the week, and we did no estimations. Everyone knew how much they could accomplish so they were pulling in tasks for the week in this half an hour meeting. Now we have a 2 hours planning every two weeks, which I find very tiring and not really effective.
• This is very important: In my opinion, ALWAYS prioritise the people and not the system. Whatever framework/methodology you choose, don't forget that people are not for systems but systems are for people.

The rest should just work out :)

[Or Orsatti]

Great last point, if I may add.

[Or Orsatti]

I think you need a project management system like scrum or something... What I can recommend you is the following thing:

• Use a system like monday.com or Trello to the actual management.
• Do a weekly meeting about the past week. In this meeting you check the progress your team has achieved.
• Set monthly sprints: Something the team need to achieve in a month. (Not have to be a month, can be any time frame.)
• In your desired system create a format for your team to enter tasks and deadlines.

That's what I can think of the top of my head. Best of luck!