Web site designers - 342 Part V: Closing Your Software Project You
342 Part V: Closing Your Software Project You also know that sometimes your advice isn t heeded, just as you sometimes discount the advice of others who offer it to you. Even if you feel as if no one cares about your advice, you need to write down every bit of the advice you have. Pretend that the audience consists only of you. Write this section to yourself and no one else. Put it in the report, and know that those who read it have the chance to gain from it. As long as you write this section with the frame of mind that you can learn from it the next time you read it, you will be doing better than 99 percent of the project managers who complete this section. You may be tempted to add advice like, Never work with that rotten programmer from ABC Programming, Inc. He s arrogant and lazy, and he never does what you ask him to do. Of course we know we don t need to tell you this, but we re going to tell you anyway. Do not put anything in writing that expresses a negative, emotional opinion to other people. Even if you feel like your project was unsuccessful because of the actions of individuals, express these concerns neutrally and in general terms, such as, A high level of programming skill was needed in this project. I advise future project managers to give unknown candidate programmers a brief skills test and conduct thorough interviews when filling the positions. Make sure someone in HR calls outsource candidates references. Creating the User Manual and Help System Every piece of software needs a user manual and a help system associated with it, even if the piece of software is a subcomponent of a much larger software product. If you re building a subcomponent, the documentation for this smaller piece may simply need to be incorporated into an already-existing framework; alternatively, it may need to have stand-alone documentation and help files. If you re creating a stand-alone product or a component with standalone help and documentation, you have a real onus to create the best documentation available. Your technical writer or assigned team member should start creating the user manual and user help documents at the start of the project. This is an important deliverable to your software project, and should not be withheld until the end of the project. We ve all heard the usual gripes that users don t read the documentation, and that they just want someone to do it for them. Developers often like to ask, How hard can it be to press the Help key? Before you give these complaints any merit, let us ask a question: When was the last time you read the manual accompanying the software you bought, whether it be a development package, a word processor, or something else?
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