It’s a must. Large or small, as a business, you need to drive your projects to their goal with focus and intentionality.
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Stakeholder Engagement
Communication Management
Integration Management
Scope Management
Resource Management
Schedule Management
Quality Management
Risk Management
Procurement Management
MassageBook is America’s leading online platform for massage therapists and bodywork professionals.
Revolutionary data modeling tool that introduces traditional database design concepts to No SQL.
An innovative app that allows real-time booking of healthcare staff used by dozens of American hospitals.
A leader in the ticketing industry in South Africa with outreach to a more than 50-million person market.
Leading provider of software development kits for PDF and EPUB technologies.
Perform Group is one of the world’s biggest digital sports content providers.
Vocabuv PMs will help you architect and build your product, with the focus on quality and time-to-market. Together with our engineers, we are here to ensure that you get it done right the first time. You will work with a Project Manager who is skilled at planning and implementing processes, managing budget and timelines. Our Project Managers have specialized training, experience and additional skills that allow them to succeed in all types of businesses.
The Project Manager will understand your business model, your market competition, actively research competitors, suggest improvements, manage your Vocabuv team alongside other teams and vendors if necessary. Overall, the PM will do everything to make your business successful.
The role of a Project Manager is to assure successful project delivery – that is software that meets its specifications, that is delivered on time, and within budget. Vocabuv Project Manager will: set up the right teams, make sure they have the right amount of time to complete their tasks and deliver on time meeting quality requirements.
Hiring a Project Manager can help optimize your software development budget in several ways. First and foremost, PM will help improve the accuracy of estimates. Secondly, they ensure changes to a project are managed effectively. Finally, Project Managers conduct thorough reviews of a project to assess risks and work on mitigating/avoiding them with your team and creating detailed contingency plans. PM will also reduce scope and/or duration of the project as well as optimize resources if necessary.
With a dedicated Project Manager on board, there are fewer chances for you or your team to miss a deadline. This benefits not only your project but also your company in general. The Project Manager should be able to identify potential risks before they become problems and help prevent them from happening.
When hiring a full-time Project Manager it means one who is dedicated to and focused exclusively on your project in the role of a PM on a full-time basis. They are involved in managing all aspects of your project from its scope and cost to risk and quality management, and more. However, you might hire a part-time Project Manager to manage a smaller scope of work, for example with smaller teams or specific components of a software project.
The Project Manager will take care of all sprint planning, and calls with you and the developers, at a minimum. However, the Project Manager is there to make your life easier when it comes to managing the project. Where agreed, you may invite the PM to other internal meetings with business stakeholders and delegate tasks to assist with the smooth flow of communications and decisions.
The answer here depends on several factors including the size and complexity of your project and teams. A good starting point is to consider having one full-time Project Manager for every 2 to 3 development teams. A full-time PM can optimally manage “teams of teams” involving about 20 team members. For smaller teams of 3 to 9 members, you may only need a part-time PM or rely upon Team Leads to spend a portion of their time in this capacity.
Project managers are essential from the very beginning of a project to make sure it starts off and stays on the right track. Ideally, they should be one of the very first people you hire. The PM will intimately familiar with your project’s requirements and actively involved in selecting its team members. They take care of the onboarding of your team and orientating them to your work processes, as well as your business and technical objectives.
If you already have an internal Project Manager, an additional external PM is likely not necessary. You can consider hiring an additional PM if you:
Actually, yes. Tech leads and PMs have quite different roles, though with smaller organizations their responsibilities can sometimes overlap. One of the core distinctions is that tech leads code though they may have other functions, too. Project managers don’t code, they focus on processes and team management and must have very strong communication skills.
We are asked this and similar questions quite frequently, like “Do I need a PM if I can prepare tasks for developers myself?” Probably the most important issue here is the opportunity-cost for startup founders and senior management in SMBs or enterprises. Are functions like scheduling and assigning tasks in JIRA (or other project management software) the most valuable activity on your agenda?
In most cases, it’s likely that you are able to engage on a more strategic basis to bring value to your business, while the PM engages in a more tactical fashion. However, we do have clients with startups who directly manage the tasks for their developers though they also tend to have considerable project management experience.
Ultimately, in most cases it’s best to hire a Project Manager. In the absence of doing so, the PM’s tasks should be clearly spread between the founder and initial team members to balance time requirements between management and development.
A Project Manager is instrumental to making sure that your software is developed according to specifications, on time and within budget. They accomplish this with a combination of risk management, team management, optimal allocation of resources, and keeping everyone clear on their tasks and progress. The one thing a PM does not do is code.
You’ll likely want all of your developers focused either on coding, design, or testing to the fullest extent possible. Here, the PM helps developers to be more productive and efficient with clear and unambiguous tasks, work processes, and more, as we explored above in how PM’s help to optimize your software development budget.
Hiring a Vocabuv Project Manager is valuable for any size of team and project regardless of the project’s complexity and team composition. Generally speaking, the smaller a team is, the more likely it can get by hiring a Project Manager on a part-time basis.
You can meet as often as you’ve agreed upon with your PM. We recommend holding regularly weekly or bi-weekly meetings based on your project’s needs.
The real answer depends on several variables including the Project Manager’s experience, the project’s complexity, business objectives, anticipated growth rate, the number of development teams involved, team size and structure, for starters. With the training and vetting process for PMs that we use in Vocabuv, we’ve found the greatest success rates when a PM is responsible for managing a maximum of 20 team members.
This figure is based on functional guidelines inferred by the Agile methodology, guidelines for efficiency such as the Ringelmann Effect and Metcalfe’s Law, but also over 18 years of software development and project management experience. It’s best to focus on number of development teams and the PM’s role in managing teams of teams. An Agile development team tends to range from 3 to 9 members, with an industry-wide median of 7 members per team.
But, not all organizations practice the Agile methodology – they could be working with Waterfall, pure Scrum or Kanban. And not all organizations have a hierarchical structure. We understand that and are happy to work with your organization to achieve the ideal composition and workflows to match your requirements.
You and your designated representatives (CFO, CTO, Vendor Manager, and the like under various titles) retain control over your budget. The Project Manager’s responsibility is to prioritize the allocation of the budget you’ve authorized for the allocation of effort to achieve your business goals.
The Project Manager is not involved in hands-on testing. However, they do coordinate with Team Leads and QA Specialists to ensure the software is properly tested and to validate that it meets usability and performance specifications.
Project managers follow what is important to the Client – your values, processes, etc. They serve to support the success of your project, and your company.
This really depends on why the previous Project Manager needed to be replaced or otherwise vacated their position. Certainly, consideration would be given to having the new PM focus on improving any issues deemed lacking with the previous Project Manager.
Not always. Frameworks are only a combination of structures and tools for a Project Manager to do his job well. Different frameworks require different time investments of the team. When starting a project, we will help you pick the optimal framework and the PM who has experience using it.
As your team gets larger or you if you have multiple Agile teams, it’s highly likely that adding additional Project Managers will be essential to the success of your software. Again, at a minimum, successful software is delivered according to specifications, on schedule and within its budget. The larger your project, the more complex it is, and the greater the chances of encountering risks to its delivery.
It really depends on the current state of your team, project, and goals, though processes are likely to be improved upon in all scenarios. When an early stage startup adds a Project Manager, for example, there are likely to be numerous changes to establish proper commit policies, definitions of done, communications plans, etc. An established SMB seeking to expand an already mature development team may see few if any changes in development processes, but a focus on optimize existing efforts.
Let’s hear what you are looking for and we’ll help you find the best solution!
