Controlling Impact of a Projects in your Systems
written by gunther gerlach-2009
Usually projects start very easy, everyone is exited and ready to work on it but in reality, for most of the player on those discovery and pre-design meetings, such as developers and designer, there is no much to do yet and they are focused on their current projects being carried out in parallel so, technical issues and integration problems are hard to find with a simple overview of the business or technical requirements.
Here are few tips that will help you to start leading your project with strong involvement and leadership from the very beginning, taking full control of the impact that your project will have over your systems and reducing your problems during testing and deployment.
Tip 1: Get involved in your company’s goals and apply them to your projects
In one of my most recently jobs as a Sr. TPM at Amazon, leading global initiatives for the Front-End services (Critical Mission) and UI, where, only in the US more than 8,000 orders are being processed every hour, I realized that our Director had a personal goal of reducing latency for Tier-1 under 200 ms. He was carrying his effort toward this goal, working very hard with the infrastructure, Storage and other teams responsible for the performance of the systems. However nobody was taking care of performance of new initiatives like Web services and API, being developed. As a result, few projects finished on time and budget were unable to satisfy the latency requirements and become the biggest offenders for our infrastructure.
When leading a project, think beyond your role and put yourself in the same position of your Manager and his/her manager. Get involved with the long term goals, with the biggest unsolved problems affecting your company and play an active role in that direction and not only in your area…
As a result of this, every time that I planned a kick-off meeting at the beginning of a new project, I included a list of technical requirements to be satisfy for any external service that needs to integrate with our systems. Among these requirements are; latency tp50, latency tp99.9, TPS (transactions per second), stress performance and load test results for each one of the services and systems behind of any new implementation.
