To students
To help some students who may want to enroll in software training
Should a non-technical person, graduate from business school, without software development knowledge be given the job of software project manager?
For someone to become a successful manager at a bank, he or she should have knowledge in business and finance. If a person doesn’t have knowledge at this level, he or she would definitely miss the finer details of business and fail. To succeed, he and she must go back to school to learn about banking and business. The same would apply to software project management. Since software development is the core of software project, a person with experience in development would certainly make a better manager.
- Advantages of having development experience:
- Can clearly understand the effort needed to finish the development tasks.
- Can help the developers if they get technically challenged.
- Will be able to make better estimates and plans.
- Can communicate well with all stakeholders.
- Can communicate in different terms with different stakeholders as needed.
- Can be confident about leading his team.
Problems due to lack of development experience:
- Could lead to bad estimations and improper controlling.
- Due to intangible nature of software, only a person who has experience in doing the development work can imagine the difficulty or ease of getting a job done.
- Team members may not respect to the decisions made as the decisions would clearly show lack of knowledge base.
- May be successful in small software projects, but would become very hard to manage large scale projects.
- Could easily become overambitious, leading to project failure.
The best way to be successful in any area is to learn about it. Learning is a lifelong experience and should never stop. It does not matter what degree or what field that you are studying, you can always return to school for additional trainings in area that you like.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
