iOS project management tips

If you are creating an app for iOS here's a tip - get organized! Sure, sure - you write super clean code and are diligent with your in-line documentation. But as programmers, we tend to not be the best at conveying important parts of projects to others that could save loads of time (and money), when other team members are involved. That's where team management solutions step in.

Marks of a good team management solution

Whether it be a two-man mobile indie developer team working on their next hit game or a mobile enterprise company, the goal of team management is to improve the quality of communication between members while removing as many unnecessary tasks as possible. Therefore, a solution has to be able to solve a few fundamental problems:

Scheduling: In order for progress to be made on a project, a development team needs to be able to prioritize what must be done and when. This requires a common place for all of the team members to be able to see important milestones and due dates.

Collaboration: Whether it be the new app icon logos or the latest documents for helping your users register, developers need a common place where information is shared and files are made readily available for deployment. It's also one of the key limiting factors to a company's scalability; because you know what they say, too many cooks in the kitchen can spoil the broth without the proper management system in place!

Communication: They don't say "Communication is key" for nothing. Part of being a good solution to the problem of team management is the capability to reduce the amount of unnecessary and unhelpful communication with more meaningful and helpful communication. This sounds simple in theory, but in practice, if you let communication just be unregulated word of mouth, it can be difficult to maintain cohesion as a team.

Team management comes in a few different flavors:

• Physical Documents - Team management can be hard. That's why it can be tempting as a small iOS development team to want to resort to using the old pen and paper sometimes to avoid the added complexity of finding a proper tool. It's a simple and highly elastic way of taking care of the problem, but these pros come at a cost. Using the old floral calendar filled with scribbles and sticky notes simply will not cut it in order to provide the entire team the transparency and information that they need to perform optimally, and this only gets worse the bigger the team. Not to mention that the entire team's scheduling information is one small disaster from going up in flames(or in my case, getting coffee-soaked beyond legibility). Yikes!
   
• The "Google Docs" Route - Some developers then recognize that they need something a little more durable to center their team management around - opting to use cloud platforms like Google Docs to store all of their team information, data, and scheduling. In my experience, however, without a constantly vigilant developer team, trying to maintain a proper file structure and file management system often fails; this results in a big huge pile of files all similarly named and all regarding different previous versions of your iOS application in a fast-paced industry. Generally, these types of solutions are highly portable and destruction resistant but fail with respect to being easily organizable and collaborative between members.
   
• Doing it right with monday.com - Professional team management tools are solving the management equation with colorful and engaging platforms that connects team members to the mobile processes that they are developing, combining the scheduling, collaboration, and communication functionality into a centralized platform. Well made team management tools, like monday.com, empower users and managers to feel connected to a project in a transparent environment. Providing avenues for communication without bogging the team down with burdensome meetings, which in the end is what good team management tools are all about.

Conclusion

In conclusion, whenever you are looking for a new team management solution for your next iOS app development project. Make sure you consider the triarchy of characteristics that make up a good team management solution: Scheduling, Collaboration, and Communication. Make sure you know the upsides and the downfalls of all of your possible solutions, whether it be paper-based, the "Google Docs" method, or a professional level solution like monday.com. And finally, I leave you with a quote from the great Brian Tracey:

“Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life.”