Slide 1 CS 310 Ch5: Project management What do you think is involved? Proposal writing Project costing Project planning and scheduling Project monitoring and reviews Personnel selection and evaluation Report writing and presentations Why is this hard? Why is it fun?

Slide Project planning Probably the most time-consuming project management activity One rarely gets it right at first Why? Things change, plans must be revised

Slide 3 Project plan structure Introduction Project organization Risk analysis Hardware and software resource requirements Work breakdown Project schedule Monitoring and reporting mechanisms How does this compare to your 402 proposal? Other types of plan: quality, maintenance, validation, training, risk analysis, configuration management, testing

Slide Project scheduling Split project into tasks and estimate time and resources required to complete each task

Slide 5 Project scheduling Tasks should produce tangible outputs for management to judge progress Milestones: often the end-point of an activity Deliverables: project results delivered to customers E.g. software design task: design milestone: present design to customer deliverable: design document

Slide 6 Activity network

Slide 7 Activity timeline (GANTT chart)

Slide 8 Staff allocation

Slide 9 Microsoft Project For scheduling and tracking a project We have a site license, you may put it on your computers Files have.mpp extension Given tasks, durations, predecessors, it creates the Gantt chart Try it What would tasks and milestones be for MPS 402 proposal?

Slide 10 Scheduling problems Estimating the difficulty of problems and, hence, the cost is hard Productivity is not proportional to the number of people Adding people to a late project makes it later (why?) The unexpected always happens Reliance on project manager intuition and experience Any others?

Slide Risk management * Technology risks * People risks * Organizational risks * Requirements risks * Estimation risks * Assess probability and seriousness of each risk * Avoidance strategies * Minimization strategies * Contingency plans A risk: the possibility an adverse event will occur E.g. a piece of hardware may be delivered late * What happened? * What will you do?