Here's how you can keep software design projects on schedule and within budget.

Create a detailed plan with clear tasks and deadlines. Ensure everyone knows the project requirements to avoid changes later. Use flexible methods like agile for regular progress checks and adjustments. Use tools to track progress and allocate resources wisely. Regularly review and update the plan to address any issues, and maintain open communication with the team and stakeholders to keep everyone aligned with the project's goals.

Planning ahead is good, but you have to also plan for a change in plan. This gets to the agile approach mentioned below. In other words you cannot put all your eggs into the planning basket! If your blueprint is too granular then you or your managers will end up micro-managing the teams to stick to the plan. Your plan needs to be just as agile as the rest of the business. Just look what happened when Covid hit or the Ukraine war hit the economy! Plans change, and you need to have a plan that can pivot with the business, economy, geo-political situations.

In my view, while planning having a good view of project risks and building a mitigation strategy is critical in managing budget and schedule while execution.

I'd be glad to share some key strategies for keeping software design projects on track: Solid Foundation: Planning and Definition Scope it Right: Clearly define the project's goals, features, and functionalities. A well-defined scope prevents scope creep, which is the uncontrolled addition of features that can derail schedules and budgets. Understanding team strengths and weaknesses allows for optimal task allocation. Chart the Course: Create a detailed project plan that outlines tasks, dependencies, timelines, and milestones. Tools like Gantt charts or Kanban boards can be helpful for visualization. Budget with Reality: Establish a realistic budget that factors in development costs, tools, and potential risks.

Being Agile has been touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread, however, almost every organization I have ever worked for only applied agile to their management and development process. Being "Agile" should incorporate all aspects of software development, including of course people management, but also on-going agile culture training, and agile culture metrics gap analysis, agile processes, and agile technology. In particular almost every single business ignores the agile technology, which breaks down into agile architecture and agile tools. Very often, not all the time, projects are developed with OOP, which is traditionally not very agile because a large complex inheritance model must be maintained in addition to the code.

Typically most project managers are looking at a combination of project schedule or project cost. However there are 3 pillars of any project delivery. The 3rd one is Features. Scope creep is one of the #1 driving factors that affect both cost and schedule. A change in requirements can double or even triple costs and scheduled delivery timelines. Even decreasing scope can have negative cost and schedule impacts, because regardless if features are being removed or de-scoped, they are being removed from a design that was established to support them, and the new decreased design must be requalified given the integration factors that can affect quality control, user workflow, user experience, etc. All of these things must be considered carefully

Business ERP software is essential for the purposes of monitoring large enterprise software projects! A high quality enterprise ERP system will contain dashboards to monitor metrics and KPIs, SOW deliverables and epic progression or progress on the key requirements contained in each epic from a top level perspective. This allows the stakeholders to make managed and informed decisions based on hard data. However, the middle managers must also ensure their KPI data for their teams is accurate and up to date otherwise leadership cannot rely on the data on their dashboards as either timely or accurate. Usually there are more teams and meetings than any one leadership team can keep up with, which is why this data is so essential!

As someone who was in charge of the projects completion date and general pace, the most important lesson in learned is do not be afraid to give disappointing news in terms of a realistic timeline and budget to complete the companies goals. You might be met with some disappointment sometimes, but the disappointment of not coming close to the time you provided the team with will be much worse. If you are being genuine and provide reasoning on why it will take longer and or cost more to complete the objective, most will respect your professional opinion. I try to offer, if possible, alternative plans to meet their initial desired goals, and mention the tradeoffs. If you follow through, you'll gain respect.