Call In A “General Contractor” For Your Tech Projects
If you’ve ever had any substantial work done on your home, chances are you’ve used a general contractor. Now, that’s not to say that you couldn’t manage each piece on your own, and many people do, but most of us leave the project in the hands of a professional. We communicate our wishes to our contractor and then we expect him or her to manage the bulk of the project. That includes the schedule and the work of each subcontractor. This model works pretty well in construction, not always perfectly, but better than some of the alternatives.
Now, consider the way in which many of you are approaching your tech projects. Even a simple project may require the coordination of several individuals or groups. A typical project might involve a server management expert, a graphical design resource, and perhaps several application developers. If you’ve hired a team, then hopefully that team has a project lead, but if your resources are individual contractors, you may find yourself struggling to keep track of each piece of your project. For the same reason you hire a general contractor in construction, you may want to consider hiring someone to manage your technical projects as well.
I was recently involved in a situation where things weren’t going as well as they should. On the client’s side, work appeared to be taking too long. On my side, work was being held up by other individuals on the project. I clearly communicated the roadblocks, but my client is not a technical person, and he had a hard time visualizing each piece of the project and who was responsible for the hold-up. He just wanted the work done.
Returning to the construction analogy, if you’re the homeowner, and you hire a plumber and an electrician, you don’t necessarily expect them to talk to one another; you’re coordinating the work. But what if you send in the electrician to do his job and he shows up on the site to find that the pipes are spraying water all over the walls? Would you expect the electrician to call the plumber and just “make it work” for you? No. The electrician’s responsibility is to inform you that he can’t complete his work because of the leaky pipes. Then you’d contact the plumber to have the pipes fixed so the electrician could proceed. It works the same way in tech.
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