App owners must not micro manage software engineers!

As the app owner you need to handle so many things that are related to your business. Managing software engineers is an intensive task and time consuming that one must handle and manage with great attention - on a daily level.

One of the best ways to improve your return-on-investment with a software development project is to outsource the development. This can substantially cut your costs by using highly-skilled labour in countries with a lower cost of living and even enable you to increase resources on the project to reduce speed to market with a product.

What to expect

However, an investment in outsourcing can be a costly one without the use of a proper project manager. For example, a project manager will:

• Ensure that your requirements are sufficiently detailed and well defined so that the project can be easily and effectively initiated by the outsourcer. You don’t want to pay for resources to sit idle while you redefine the scope.
• Ensure that requirements are broken down into features, tasks and user stories. This makes it much easier to communicate specific requirements to individual developers and for them to focus on their responsibilities.
• Ensure that requirements are mapped for dependencies between project stakeholders. This cuts down on idle time by ensuring that a stage is complete before bringing another resource on to work on the next stage.
• Ensure that any processes you need applied to development are mapped, planned and communicated effectively.
• Act as a scrum master in agile development processes which cuts down the need for a separate resource for this.
• Ensure that client expectations are clear and constantly communicated to relevant stakeholders, developers, etc. as necessary.
• Ensure that the client is always aware of the progress of the project and when any objectives are achieved.
• Ensure that the client has been fully engaged with the process and is happy about the plan of action.
• Ensure that the client’s milestones are approved in the exact manner that they require.

If your project requires backend support; it can be absolutely critical for a project manager to coordinate between the project team and ensure that your development process runs efficiently in parallel and your product release schedule is enhanced.

Your time is valuable

Your time is too valuable to spend it on recruiting every development resource personally. It’s much easier to appoint the right project manager and let them handle the recruitment for you.

That leaves you free to concentrate on other business issues and ensures that development supports your objectives without overwhelming them. This is even more important for start-up operations where adhering to a launch schedule is critical.

Your business needs your attention during launch and that won’t give you enough time to manage a development team elsewhere.

The biggest advantage of using a project manager to handle the process is that it feels like working with a one-stop-shop. You don’t need to break up the job, manage the outflow and inflow of work, or spend any time at all on coordinating resources for maximum impact – that’s the project manager’s role.

They can handle user experience design and development, android and iOS development, server development, application professional services hosting, etc. for you and that’s a much easier way to get your app to market than doing it yourself.

Summary

Hence , delegate the project management of your software product to a team of experts who will serve as a single interface for everything you need, without forcing you to spend your precious time on micro management.