The Importance Of Project Management

I recently was asked to help out on a web application as a developer, tasked with helping build out the platform. And no, this isn't Sugar Steem which I am actively working on and excited to be a part of. My plate is already full, but I agreed to help where I could and time would permit.

After a week, I was removed from their development channels in Discord and I asked why. The response I got was to the effect of, "it has been a week and you haven't done anything yet" I was shocked because I offered to volunteer my time and expertise for free initially. But the warning signs were there.

As you can probably gather, I was confused and slightly amused they thought that I could do something in a week without designs, without a feature list or any idea of what this platform was going to do. I am not a designer, I stay away from that because I believe UX/UI design is a separate specialist skill.

I politely laid out my thoughts and perspective on the situation:

• One of the founders of the idea has been doing some development work and spent a week working on a really simple landing page that should only take 1 hour to build
• There is no project manager or leader pushing things forward, making sure everyone has what they need
• There is no design and the design work that had been done for the landing page looked like a high-school coding project (horrid transparency, mismatched fonts, position absolute/fixed for everything)
• Emphasis on the developer (which was me) doing everything from coming up with the features, design and how it should all work

What makes it more comical is they're planning on running an initial coin offering (ICO) for this and admittedly their idea isn't technically complex or even original, it's a recipes application built on top of the Steem blockchain. A simple fork of Busy.org with targeted categories for the recipes.

What makes this concerning besides how amateur they are, is the fact there is no project management. In all of my years as a developer, failure in a project usually comes down to management. If the project manager doesn't keep things on track, deadlines are missed and it costs companies real money. It also means that your team are wasting time because they don't know what they're meant to be doing.

A project manager not only manages the team, they also serve as the communication layer between the employees and the business, which in turn communicates with the client. The project manager is the captain of the ship and if it goes off course, well I am sure you know what happened to the Titanic when it hit that iceberg.

I dodged a bullet with this one. Because I have no doubt in my mind this project is going to fail without leadership, it'll just be a slow failure if they somehow manage to raise money through an ICO (which I highly doubt).

Image source Pixabay.