Gunnar Ahlberg - Into software home

Praise to the Pust project

The project Pust, “Polisens utredningsstöd” was a mild success and even nominated as the most successful IT-project by IDG CIO Awards. I’d like to share some ideas on what made the project a success. In the end, the project ran over budget with only 0.5%, delivered 8 times to production during one year. The customer acceptance tests was a pleasant meeting with spontaneous applause from the end users. How often do you get applause from your end user? Poliser

The people

The recruitment of the people to the project was exceptional, Johan Rahm, Tomas Alsterlund and Ulf Sköld really understood and focused on the idea that a great team can achieve great things. The members on the project were top-notch, every developer was fluent in the libraries, every tester new how to test with confidence and cared about the details and every business analyst really understood the customer. So, that was never anything I as a team leader ever bothered about, the basics were already known. So, every team member could focus 100% on the tasks they chose as well as improve the overall process and achieve the project goals.

True confidence in the people

The ideas ran from the people to the decision makers based on grounded discussions. Rather than a top-down approach were every decisions was from a management level, ideas from the developers, testers and business analysts of the teams were the ones who based the decisions. Thank you top management for trusting in the people close to the ground. In my view, this was one of the reasons the project continued to improve and over time become much of a self playing piano (I heard the project manager say this)