When I look back over recent projects that I've been involved in, it seems that one key to making a project successful is having someone on the team who really drives it forward: someone who is invested in the project as a whole and not just their own part in it. We (by which I mean the University's Applications division) have a well-defined project process, with defined roles, required milestones, deployment standards, and so forth. All these are useful, but if the team doesn't have a leader, it seems a project can lose its way, perhaps not responding to changing circumstances, getting stuck on a technical problem, or not securing a needed resource in time to meet some external constraint. The leader can be any member of the team - it could be a developer, a project manager, or the sponsor, or someone in another role. A team can include several people who are this committed to the project; it doesn't have to be a single person. As an example, one of our sen
Thoughts on enterprise architecture and related ideas. I am an enterprise architect and the University of Edinburgh. These posts are personal opinion and do not represent an official position of any part of the University of Edinburgh. For official news, read the EA service blog