Teamwork and good communications cannot be achieved only by managerial techniques

Teamwork and good communications on software development cannot be achieved only by managerial techniques – including “project management techniques”. It requires some engineering techniques. Most of those engineering techniques are developed in enterprise level large projects in the past 10 years on Java platforms, and typically it will take 2 ~ 3 years to “get it” (as a result, short term training does not work).

Managers (including project managers) are certainly not responsible for the details of those engineering techniques, however, they are responsible for identifying the needs for those engineering techniques, and identifying the right people who know those techniques, and recommend them and support them – this is arguably the most important job for mangers. However, it is also the most difficult one -- because you need to know a lot to tell pretenders. Pretenders will be revealed, eventually; however, usually it is after creating huge damages, and, there is certainly plenty of supply of pretenders.

You may say, what are those techniques? For starters, techniques of modeling, designing, and refactoring, automated unit testing, coding standards, using source control and ways of using source control – they are not managerial, not even “project-managerial” (at least not the focus for project managers); however, they are crucial for teamwork and communications.