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

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

Software Team Organization

• Democratic decentralized (rotating task coordinators and group consensus)
• Controlled decentralized (permanent leader, group problem solving, subgroup implementation of solutions)
• Controlled centralized (top level problem solving and internal coordination managed by team leader)

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

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 network (e.g. informal discussion with people other than project team members)

The Product

• Software scope (context, information objectives, function, 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, and 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 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

The Project

• 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