Mike Wyatt's Weblog

Steve McConnell and the Art of Enterprise Project Management

One of my favorite authors on how to do Project Management right is Steve McConnell. Steve has written a variety of books on both software coding practices as well as project management.
Let's be honest - Identity Management implementations are more closely aligned with an application development project than installing an office productivity tool like OpenOffice. Yes, there is an enterprise software solution providing the foundation for the implementation; that said the specifics of the deployment are in various configuration files. In addition, Identity Management solutions, by definition touch other systems such as LDAP, RACF, RDBMS systems etc.
he approach you need to take with implementing an application development effort is analogous to the approach required for an implementation of Identity Management software. What are aspects of an Identity Management solution project?

• Requirements need to be defined / agreed upon

• The solution must be designed

• The solution must be architected

• The solution must be configured / built

• The solution must be validated and tested

• The solution must be promoted into production

• The solution must be managed after implementation

• The project must have change control

• The implementation team must use Source Configuration Management such as CVS

• The project needs a defined governance approach

• etc...

Several of my favorite books from Steve include:

• Software Project Survival Guide - ISBN: 1-57231-621-7

• Code Complete Second Edition - ISBN- 0735619670

Steve has just released a new book that I've just ordered and expect will as good if not better than his previous works: Software Estimation- Demystifying the Black Art - ISBN: 0735605351. In addition, Steve's company,Construx Software has good information on software training and reference resources. Check out this site and look at the CxOne content available as well.

Posted at 10:32AM Nov 06, 2006 by Michael Wyatt in Identity Management  |