Just like the saying, “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy”, my advice is, all tech and no peeps make software projects fail.  Clearly stated, even with a staff that possesses all the technical skills to have, software projects are doomed to fail if we neglect to understand, acquire, and utilize what are now being termed, soft skills.  Basically, soft skills are people skills.

It is my strong believe that neglecting soft skills in favor of purely technical ones substantially increases the risk of failure for software projects.  Soft skills are fundamentally instrumental to vastly improve the odds that a software project will succeed.  Why?  Well, that is the subject of this entry.

Right off the bat, in his preface, Dr. Peters explains how he, himself, witnessed highly skilled developers and project managers fail at completing their software projects (Peters, 2008).  Although, we can speculate on the validity of that statement’s implicit generalization, the beauty of his book is that Dr. Peters bases his conclusions, not only on long experience, but also on hard data.  Furthermore, these data not only substantiate my premise in this entry, but they also detail that project management and leadership are the fulcrum for soft skill implementation.  That is to say, it is mostly up to the project managers—fulfilling their roles as leaders—to ensure that all members of the project team practice good people skills.

It is certainly why I think such good articles like “The Softer Side of the Architect” are being written.  In that article, Shirey enumerates what he feels are the three basic soft skills needed by software architects to be successful.  These three are: Business Alignment, Perspective Awareness, and Communication.  To the point of my entry here, however, Shirey begins his article by explaining why soft skills are so relevant.  For instance, the Microsoft Certified Architect program includes sections on soft skills.  Furthermore, the inclusion of these was based on focus groups from small to large companies.  This is surely proof that we are beginning to realize why we need to tap into the human element.

Developers are substantially more productive in an environment where most if not all opinions are actively listened to, where decisions can be questioned openly, and where innovation can be expressed with out fear of failure (Peters, 2008).  I can personally vouch for that.

Indeed, we need to start focusing a lot more on what it means to be a project manager and leader and begin a more productive phase of trials and errors to this end.  We have the data, and it shows that although the industry has made great strides in technological advances, projects continue to fail at virtually the same rate (Peters, 2008).

References

(Shirey, 2008) Shirey, J. “The Softer Side of the Architect,” web site.  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/arcjournal/cc505973.aspx.

(Peters, 2008) Peters, L. J. Getting Results from Software Development Teams. Microsoft Press, 2008.