Software project management "cliff's notes" found

This week I was given an opportunity. My boss's boss asked me to be the "project champion" for a set of features that we (the company) would like to see in our application, but that nobody has time to actually do.

I recognize this as both an opportunity and a potential pitfall. It is an opportunity because this may allow me to gain enough influence to fundamentally alter some of the brain damage we've been inflicting on ourselves for the last few years.

This is a potential pitfall because it is just as likely that this is an empty label given to a sucker who is complaining to shut him up. With the label comes extra responsibility but no authority and failure ensues.

To explore the issue, and figure out what it means to be a project "champion" at my company, I decided to write a proposal. It might be a bit of a power play to massage my job function, maybe get a budget of my own and start hacking away at the afore mentioned brain damage, but at a minimum the process of thinking about what the heck would solve this problem.

Anyway, this is just a really long way of saying that I did a Google search for "project champion" and found notes from a course on software project management by the University of Glamorgan in the UK. Many of the principles there will be old-hat to anyone involved in software projects, but there are good sections on development methodology, planning and some of the corporate-political aspects of project management.