Project Management

Introduction  Project management process goes alongside the system development process Process management process made up of three components:  Creating a project plan  Monitoring whether project is proceeding according to plan and putting in place the procedures for quality assurance.  Quality assurance is managed by in place the quality assurance steps for review of project deliverables.

Measuring the process  LEVEL1: Initial - where the process is ad hoc.  LEVEL2: Repeatable – where there is a basic development process together with a project management process to track costs, schedule and functionality  LEVEL3: Defined – where the project management process is documented and integrated with the development process, with quality review in place  LEVEL4: Managed – where detailed measures of the development process are made and correlated with the product quality.  LEVEL5: Optimized – where measure are used as feedback to improve the process.

Planning  Planning must determine how each task fits into the process.  Plan defined the sequence in which tasks are carried out.  Include stating how long a task will take and defined its starting and completion time.  Estimates of the effort needed to complete each of the required tasks. These estimates are then used to allocate resources to a task and in turn determine how long it will take.

Estimating  Evaluating the amount and complexity of work to be done in each task. This information used to determined the resources needed to complete the work.  Estimates will depend on the type of work carried out in the task. Experience related of the type of task can be where:  Existing software is used  Previous experience exists  Similar experience exists  Totally new development

Identifying and evaluating risk  Idea of risk management has become important  Most likely factors that cause project to fail or estimate to be incorrect and then take precaution either to avoid them or deal with them.  Minimum risk is to use evolutionary or prototype cycle where we are deal with system and have no historical precedence to suggest needed recourse  Proper risk management require additional planning to evaluate the difficulties of achieving project goals.

Cont..  Risk of incorrect requirements leading to frequent change – provide for change management, use evolutionary or prototyping, better customer involvement.  Risk posed by new technology – hire or train technology experts in technology

Organizing Resource  Important part project management process is to organize the resource need to carry out the project.  Project organizing includes a variety of resource, choosing the right people for the project and organizing them into team, other resource to be organized such as computers and terminals, building space or productivity tools.

Defining the Project schedule  Once tasks are determined and their time requirements knows, then its necessary to determine their sequence.  The project plan will define the timing will define the timing of tasks, including start end time, the resource, included the people needed for each task.

Tools used in project scheduling  The considerable information is necessary to keep of project estimates and to monitor progress.  Necessary to maintain a database on project status and resource.  Database assists management with quantitative controls.  Planning and usage data is input to the database and reports about current resource status.  Activity start and end dates can form part of the inputs. The start and end dated can be monitored and deviation from the planned schedules output as exception reports.

Network chart  A network chart as well as showing the schedule times for each task, shows the dependence of one task on other task.  There is one line for each task on the Pert chart. The line for each task is a continuation from lines of a previous task.  A task cannot start until all its incoming tasks have been completed  The output from Pert network:  Determine a critical path – These are the activities that must commence on time;  Determine the earliest and latest start time for each activity.