constituents or software project management

constituents or software project management

All projects have different constituents that behave differently under different conditions and hence are unpredictable. As a result, it becomes difficult to exercise control over them. At the start of the project, these constituents are not fully known and hence add to the woes of project management. For example, initial requirement analysis and gathering would have detailed out the needs of the end-users. However, as the project progresses, a lot of changes happen to these requirements. The business model of the customer might change resulting in a change in requirements, change of end-users, that is, a separate set of end-users would definitely like to change the requirements of their predecessors, thus making it difficult to proceed in project execution as it was planned earlier. 

        These changes have a cascading effect on the next processes such as design and construction testing. Whatever would have been planned based on initial requirement analysis would have to be changed to accommodate the new changes. As a result, initial estimation for effort, schedule, and objectives have to be revisited, which result in cost overrun. Many times these changes lead to customer dissatisfaction and new elements of behavioral aspects come into play For project management, control and monitoring of the projects are quite important. 

     To manage this, the project is usually broken into smaller manageable granular levels of work. These granular work help in tracking these work to completion. It has been observed that no two projects will have similar granular level details as the projects will differ from each other in terms of their objective. As a result, one project structure will not be effective for another project. This is evident from the fact that in smaller projects, higher-level design and lower-level design can be combined to make one design stage, whereas in larger projects, these can be separated so that databases can be effectively designed and used. In smaller projects, there could be one testing stage, which will be a combination of integration testing and system testing, whereas in larger projects, there could be more than on system testing stage. An effective project manager must ensure that all these stages are well defined and at the completion of the stage, the deliverables are reviewed, corrected or modified and rework completed. It is advisable to have a formal sign off so that the team can move to the next process

The PM must take into account the different characteristics of the project that are peculiar to that project. The understandings of these characteristics allow the manager to tailor standard processes to accommodate these unique characteristics of the project. This also helps to reduce the risks associated with the project. In essence, this ensures that even though the overall project management process is the same still unique characteristics are well controlled. For example, in an offshore environment, it will make a lot of economic sense to station designers at offshore locations and have one onsite representative who will remain near the customer. Any issue or doubts raised by the design team will

 Software Project Management:

be discussed with the customer and then carried back to the team. In smaller projects, certain elements of project management can be tailored to reduce any unnecessary bureaucratic procedures.

In summary, the project management process has the following constituents that need to be understood well for better control and monitoring. These are an estimation, monitoring and control, defect management, change management, risk management, verification and validation process, and project organization structure. Detailed discussion on these constituents