Chapter 2. Software Project Planning

An urgent need can be a good motivator. Software is usually built to address an urgent need. For the stakeholdersmeaning everyone who has a concern or real interest in the success of the projectthe fact that the need is urgent helps to convince the organization to dedicate time and energy to addressing it. For the software engineers, an urgent need means that their work will be appreciated and used in the foreseeable future. And for the management of the organization, it means that there is a clear direction in how they need to run things.

But urgency can also be the source of a project's most difficult problems. Urgency causes people to panic, and to potentially gloss over important parts of the project. People will rush into gathering requirements (or, even worse, rush into building the code!) without thoroughly understanding the needs of the people who want the software built.

If a project manager does not really understand the context in which the software is being built, then the only thing that the project team sees is the urgency; they lose track of the needs. They can see the individual problems that they are working to solve, but they may lose track of the big picture.

Unless the team understands the needs that drive the project, they may end up with a narrow focus, causing them to waste time addressing problems that are of little importance to the stakeholders. It's easy to build great software that solves the wrong problems, but the only way to build the appropriate software is for everyone in the project to understand and agree on both why and how that software will be built before the work begins. That's the purpose of project planning.