Team Composition

Posted on March 22, 2005
Filed Under Management, Teamwork | Leave a Comment

Yesterday I had a meeting with our business partner on a SAP Integration project. Basically it involved porting a J2EE app on to the SAP Net Weaver platform. My initial thoughts was to take on the project myself, but the discussion made me believe that it was more of a programming chore than an implementation project. Further the margins on the project did not justify me doing it. We accepted the project nevertheless.

So my next problem was deciding what kind of a resource to allocate to this project. A critical element of software development is the resource  doing the work.  Experience developers bring in more productivity, justifying their higher salaries (and our lower margins). An college grad or an in-experienced developer may come at a price that will yield higher margins. So who is the right fit ? A project initially estimated around 4-6 man weeks is not a candidate for the outsourcing industry, so lets not go there.

The irony is that as a project manager, we emphasize on quality,  client satisfaction and other metrics but never the margins. As we get higher in the pecking order, and accountable for growing a practice, a new term ‘Profit Center’ gets coined. If you are out there consulting and preaching ROI to your clients, you better be practicing the same back home (work). Where is the ROI for your practice? With responsibilities, comes accountability and that means duking it out for those margins.

As far as the project goes, we decided to provide a resource to my business partner, and transfer total accountability and ownership of the project to them. I believe, with the right guidance, most people on a project (irrespective of experience) will do the best they can.  We just need to close the loop, by empowering them to make the technical decisions. In such cases you become the fallback guy, in case they get stuck midway in the process.