To whom is may concern.
This article is focus on the role of Project Manager (PM), specialising in Enterprise Integration Projects.
Being an Integration Project Manager is more than just managing people well and deliver the project on-time. The larger the organization the more organisational politic you have to navigates, at the enterprise level no one is willing to take ownership of a particular application or system because they their job will be on the line if something goes wrong. Therefore at the enterprise landscape the PM must make regular meeting with the project stakeholders and affiliates application owners to ensure the development is synchronies and that all input/output data that coming in/out of your application matches the requirements. 60% of enterprise integration project failed simply because they dont validate the inputs and outputs, which in turn polluted the whole enterprise environment.
At the core of Integration Project Manager is control the running of each team ensuring what they are doing is inline with the overall enterprise architecture, by coordinating all projects to have correct inputs and outputs. The rule of thumb is enforces each application to validate their own input/output and having mechanism to stop the system from sending out junk data if error is found. Because often data produced by one application will be used by another application. Designing enterprise application with the enterprise architecture in mind will void the ripple effect when deploying the application in live environment. In most enterprise architecture live environment is very fragile and critical to the business, because once it goes down everyone in the media will know about it. Therefore avoid as less disturbance as possible when rolling out new application, to avoid business down-time.
Re-using principle in application development is a good practice. But over-used component can cause environment bottle neck and heavy dependency on a single component. This is where the debate around should a component be duplicated for effective performance.
Error Management Framework (EMF) must exist in all application development; this will reduce the scale and cost of support on the application. When error is detected internally within the application appropriate action will be taken as the error is manage and understood by the application, the ability for self-recovery. For more critical error an email will send out the support person to resolve the issue. It is best practice to let EMF acts as a firewall to an interface, because if an error event is raised, the interface can react to whethere or not to suspend the triggers, resulting in request rejection.
Every document that enters the enterprise infrastructure must be assign with a unique document number in order to keep track of the document when it navigates through the enterprise. A better practice is maintaining version control for all organization documents, because application will be change and replace, document structure will be change and evoke.
Finally, an expectation from an integration project manager is understand that the delivery process is in real time, the application is introduce into a living enterprise environment where other systems and application is currently active.
My integration project manager is useless, he doesnt address none of the above issues. He's just clown around all day.