What Is Software Project Management?

     What Is Software Project Management?

understanding software projects:

      A project, in general, is understood to be a group of activities that are carried out to achieve a certain outcome. Each project, thus, will have well-defined objectives, which would measure the success or failure of the project. Construction of house, bridge, apartment complex, airport construction as well as a renovation of existing airports are some examples of projects. Making a movie, starting a new organization, and revamping the exiting organization to achieve better results would also be considered projects.

       In IT industry, software projects involve the implementation of applications using new technology or improving upon the functionalities of existing applications using technology, The usage of technology for completion of an application and using it for organization business purposes differentiate the software projects from a general definition of projects. In essence, software projects use technology to develop or improve existing applications for meeting business requirements. In

 software project management:

The essence of project management is to make sure that all the agreed objectives are accepted, executed, and shared among all the stakeholders. An effective project management will ensure that all the stakeholders are identified at the initial stage itself and then "buy-in" the objectives This makes sure that the stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process and understand their role in achieving the objectives. In order to achieve these, the first step in project management would be to start planning for all these. 

          It is said that the more effort that we spend in planning, the better result we can get. Detailed planning will help identify minute details and plan for these details at that granular level. Even planning should include the control and monitoring aspect of the project and should have details such as when to control, who should review the progress, what should be the quality of intermediary deliverables, and so forth. Even escalation and communication protocol should be well defined in the planning document. 

         Escalation policy should include different stages of escalation and is typically associated with service level agreement. If one particular issue is not closed within a certain timeframe, then the escalation policy should detail the next level of escalation with an associated timeframe. Similarly, communication protocol will have details of who to communicate with whom; this helps in offshore project development activities where there is a

need to communicate with onsite team members and customers as well. The protocol guides the team members to categorize issues and to set up calls with corresponding colleagues.

The success of project management is entrusted to the project manager (PM). Even though there are many stakeholders, the PM shoulders the responsibility of project management. To be successful, the PM goes through training and workshops to improve his/her skills. Some of the elements that contribute to the success of project management are as follows:

        clearly stated and understood objectives, role, and responsibilities of each team member, communication protocol, escalation process, clearly defined project organization structure, which will show the process of information flow, periodic status report review, and changed the management process.  

     These elements are translated into different processes and procedures such that the control and monitoring become quantitative and predictable. Predictability is an important aspect of project management; this ensures that customers, as well as team members, can predict the quality and the schedule of the deliverables. The predictability of project management is enhanced through the usage of statistical tools and techniques such as Pareto chart and trend analysis. The FM must be trained on these techniques.