Enterprise project lessons

Being in the technical lead for an enterprise project teaches you a thing or two. I was wearing those shoes recently for one of our projects recently and here is what I learnt :

1. If you are going to be using a framework of any sort you better know it inside out, left to right and top to bottom. When funky modifications are asked for or if your application starts to slow down you better know exactly or roughly where to start tweaking. This is the reason too why my partner feels that the bigger the project, the closer to the metal the framework used has go to be.

2. If the scope of the project is large and you suspect you might not have enough developers, never never never choose to use a tool which leaves you with one choice when it come to developers. For our case we had to give in and go the php route for this particular project. In my company we have shunned php in the past choosing not to use for any projects, but we had to bow in to pressure this time because it was just too hard trying to find capable and dependable python developers where we are. Once we caved in and accepted php, we found a pool of capable php programmers.

3. I can never over emphasize the next one. Never never never never under estimate the scope of a project especially if it pays a lot. When the customer says "I just need a web page to capture data" always ask for more information. It might not just be the application that is complex, it might even turn out to be the setup itself that is going to pose a challenge. In our case, we had to deploy multiple instances of our application in a few remote places to allow data entry people to key data. At the end of the day we had to merge the data all back into a central database.

4. For any project always look for a capable PM. It might lower your bottom line, but trust me it's worth it. A good PM will save you 3 am calls while at the same time allow you to multi task in the back ground and do what you do best. Fortunately for us, we have found such a candidate in my old business associate though we cannot use him for this project fearing our customer might just freak out seeing a new PM on the job !

5. Always have a old school unix or Linux who knows all the old text mangling tricks loaded and ready. In this case it was my partner. Even when doing seemingly unrelated stuff like web application never under estimate the usefulness of these guys. We had to move about 50,000 records trapped in excel into the database and his skills proved invaluable ! (Not that I am that much behind now, but I had to concentrate on getting the web end up)

In the end though, through all the late nights and sweat, this project has thought invaluable lessons in project management as well as resource planning.