A project planning and development process for small teams

A good manager is a remover o f obstacles and a provider o f r e s o u r c e s . his phrase circulates through management circles in various versions. It normally conjures up visions of managers resolving crises dur ing projects, providing people and equipment as they are needed. But the work of removing obstacles and providing resources should start before a project even begins. A good manager can remove many obstacles before they appear by providing one of the most fundamental resources any project can have: a dear ly defined plan and process definition. The plan tells team members what needs to be done and when, while the process definition tells them how it should be done and how to know when it has been done with adequate quality. This leads to another aphorism: "A good manager makes sure that all team members know what they are supposed to do, and how to tell whether they have done a good job." Wi th a good process definition in hand, the project manager becomes a shepherd or facilitator, seeing to it that the team has what it needs and ensuring that the project is progressing as it should. This article documents a process for software development designed and successfully used by the Academic Comput ing Depar tment of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in Dallas, Texas. Standing at the start of a complex five-year development project, the department realized that seat-of-the-pants management techniques would not be successful. We decided to organize ourselves as a "structured open team," and to adopt some of the techniques promoted by the total quali ty movement.