Key success element in software projects: Business

Software projects are sets of complex processes, although it’s very challenging to define a perfection recipe, there are some elements that contribute hugely in the success of any software project: People, Business, and Process. In this mini series, I’m discussing those 3 elements referencing many points to Dwayne Philips’ software project management handbook.

What’s the business perspective?

Every software is being made for a reason, be that fulfilling some desire, completing a job, automating a habit, whatsoever! Usually, the business perspective is interchangeably: Why we’re spending time and money to build software? Start find answers to this question and you’ll find your own business perspective

Why and how it’s different?

Well, taking into consideration that -in a study held by the Standish group at 2002- only 28% of projects could make it on time and with all the desired functionality, it’s obvious that business visibility within the project can affect the productivity of all the people engaged in the project.

Why most projects fail from business perspective?

Business visibility is sometimes vague, hard-to-tell, and not as straightforward as the software problems. Most people engaged in the project are software people with programming background, such background when you have a clear visibility over what problems you need to solve, and in most cases, the techniques you need to follow in order to solve them. But when we talk about business problem, there’s a bigger scope defined here, there’s a whole new set of techniques that you need to use in order to tackle and solve these problems. These techniques tend to make it as streamlined as possible for everyone what’s required to be done, why, and how.

How can you understand your business scope?

There are some questions that you can ask in order to get more visibility about what’s your business scope, why you’re investing time and money to build something? These questions include:

Who will use the software?


Who wants it and who doesn’t?


What will the software do for the user and for our business?


Where people will use it?


When do the users want it?


Why do the users want it?


Why does our business need it?

What can we do differently to bring more value to the customer and to our business?

And the list can go on. But basically, you should be asking yourself, what’s the ultimate purpose of this project/software and why you’re investing your team powers to build something.

In the next and last part of this series, we’ll be talking about Process, the heart of any software project life cycle, what makes things work in harmony together in order to achieve the desired goal of valuable software.