Successful Management of Software Projects
Article from German Magazine Informatik-Spektrum, October 2004

For enterprises of all industrial sectors, high productivity and quality in the development of business information systems are of strategical relevance.

Custom application development is expensive and time-consuming, but at the same time crucial for the competitiveness of companies, especially in the long term. Nevertheless, in practice many large software projects have less than satisfactory results due to a culpable negligence of critical non-technical success factors.

This article wants to recall these factors, showing their relevance for real projects. From these factors, a set of guidelines for the management of software projects is derived. Although none of them is really new, they are often violated - in practice as well as in current process models. Together, they yield a pragmatic, best-practice methodology which is based on extensive experience as well as on scientific systematics, incorporating the identified success factors for development and management.

Additional information (in German) can be found at the 4Soft website.