Project Management Concepts

Chapter 31 - Project Management Concepts

Overview

• Project management involves the planning, monitoring, and control of people, process, and events that occur during software development.
• Everyone manages, but the scope of each person's management activities varies according his or her role in the project.
• Software needs to be managed because it is a complex undertaking with a long duration time.
• Managers must focus on the fours P's to be successful (people, product, process, and project).
• A project plan is a document that defines the four P's in such a way as to ensure a cost effective, high quality software product.
• The only way to be sure that a project plan worked correctly is by observing that a high quality product was delivered on time and under budget.

 

Management Spectrum

• People (recruiting, selection, performance management, training, compensation, career development, organization, work design, team/culture development)
• Product (product objectives, scope, alternative solutions, constraint tradeoffs)
• Process (framework activities populated with tasks, milestones, work products, and QA points)
• Project  (planning, monitoring, controlling)

 

People

• Stakeholders (senior managers, project managers, practitioners, customers, end-users)
• Team leadership model (motivation, organization, innovation)
• Characteristics of effective project managers (problem solving, managerial identity, achievement, influence and team building)

 

Factors Affecting Team Organization

• Difficulty of problem to be solved
• Size of resulting program
• Team lifetime
• Degree to which problem can be modularized
• Required quality and reliability of the system to be built
• Rigidity of the delivery date
• Degree of communication required for the project

 

Team Organizational Paradigms

• Closed paradigm (top level problem solving and internal coordination managed by team leader, good for projects that repeat past efforts)
• Random paradigm (team loosely structured success depends on initiative of individual team members, paradigm excels when innovation and technical breakthroughs required)
• Open paradigm (rotating task coordinators and group consensus, good for solving complex problems – not always efficient as other paradigms)
• Synchronous paradigm (relies on natural problem compartmentalization and team organized to require little active communication with each other)

 

Toxic Team Environment Characteristics

• Frenzied work atmosphere where team members waste energy and lose focus on work objectives
• High frustration and group friction caused by personal, business, or technological problems
• Fragmented or poorly coordinated procedures or improperly chosen process model blocks accomplishments
• Unclear role definition that results in lack of accountability or finger pointing
• Repeated exposure to failure that leads to loss of confidence and lower morale

 

 
Agile Teams

• Teams have significant autonomy to make their own project management and technical decisions
• Planning kept to minimum and is constrained only by business requirements and organizational standards
• Team self-organizes as project proceeds to maximum contributes of each individual’s talents
• May conduct daily (10 – 20 minute) meeting to synchronized and coordinate each day’s work
• What has been accomplished since the last meeting?
• What needs to be accomplished by the next meeting?
• How will each team member contribute to accomplishing what needs to be done?
• What roadblocks exist that have to be overcome?

 

Coordination and Communication Issues

• Formal, impersonal approaches (e.g. documents, milestones,  memos)
• Formal interpersonal approaches (e.g. review meetings, inspections)
• Informal interpersonal approaches (e.g. information meetings, problem solving)
• Electronic communication (e.g. e-mail, bulletin boards, video conferencing)
• Interpersonal networking (e.g. informal discussion with people other than project team members)

 

The Product

• Software scope (context, information objectives, function, and performance)
• Problem decomposition (partitioning or problem elaboration - focus is on functionality to be delivered and the process used to deliver it)

 

The Process

• Process model chosen must be appropriate for the:

• customers and developers
• characteristics of the product
• project development environment

• Project planning begins with melding the product and the process
• Each function to be engineered must pass though the set of framework activities defined for a software organization
• Work tasks may vary but the common process framework (CPF) is invariant (project size does not change the CPF)
• The detail of the actual work tasks used to complete each framework activity and dependent on the size and complexity of the project
• The job of the software engineer is to estimate the resources required to move each function though the framework activities to produce each work product
• Project decomposition begins when the project manager tries to determine how to accomplish each CPF activity

 

Signs of Potential Project Failure

• Developers do not understand customer’s needs
• Product scope poorly defined
• Changes poorly managed
• Chosen technology changes
• Business needs change or ill-defined
• Deadlines unrealistic
• Users are resistant
• Sponsorship lost or never obtained
• Project team members lack appropriate skills
• Managers and practitioners avoid best practices and lessons learned

 

Avoiding Project Failure

• Start on the right foot
• Maintain momentum
• Track progress
• Make smart decisions
• Conduct a postmortem analysis

 

W5HH Principle

• Why is the system being developed?
• What will be done by When?
• Who is responsible for a function?
• Where are they organizationally located?
• How will the job be done technically and managerially?
• How much of each resource is needed?

 

Critical Practices

• Formal risk management
• Empirical cost and schedule estimation
• Metric-based project management
• Earned value tracking
• Defect tracking against quality targets
• People-aware program management