Project Management Concepts

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 The Management Spectrum: The Four P’s

• People — the most important element of a successful project

• Product — the software to be built

• Process — the set of framework activities and software engineering tasks to

get the job done

• Project — all work required to make the product a reality

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 People : Stakeholders

• Senior managers who define the business issues that often have significant influence on the
project.
• Project (technical) managers who must plan, motivate, organize, and control the
practitioners who do software work.

• Practitioners who deliver the technical skills that are necessary to engineer a product or
application.

• Customers who specify the requirements for the software to be engineered and other
stakeholders who have a peripheral interest in the outcome.

• End-users who interact with the software once it is released for production use. 3
 Software Teams
How to lead?

How to organize?

How to collaborate?

How to motivate? How to create good ideas?

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 Team Leaders

• The MOI Model

• Motivation. The ability to encourage (by “push or pull”) technical people to
produce to their best ability.
• Organization. The ability to mold existing processes (or invent new ones) that
will enable the initial concept to be translated into a final product.
• Ideas or innovation. The ability to encourage people to create and feel
creative even when they must work within bounds established for a particular
software product or application. 5
 Team Leaders
Another view [Edg95] of the characteristics that define an effective project man-
ager emphasizes four key traits:
• Problem solving. An effective software project manager can diagnose
the technical and organizational issues that are most relevant,
systematically structure a solution or properly motivate other
practitioners to develop the solution.
• Managerial identity. A good project manager must take charge of the
project. Achievement. A competent manager must reward initiative
and accom- plishment to optimize the productivity of a project team.
• Influence and team building. An effective project manager must be
able to “read” people; she must be able to understand verbal and
nonverbal sig- nals and react to the needs of the people sending these
signals. 6
 Software Teams
Mantei [Man81] describes seven project factors that should be considered
when planning the structure of software engineering teams:
• The difficulty of the problem to be solved

• The size of the resultant program(s) in lines of code or function points

• The time that the team will stay together (team lifetime)

• The degree to which the problem can be modularized

• The required quality and reliability of the system to be built

• The rigidity of the delivery date

• The degree of sociability (communication) required for the project 7

 Organizational Paradigms
Constantine [Con93] suggests four “organizational paradigms” for software engineering teams:

• Closed paradigm—structures a team along a traditional hierarchy of authority

• Random paradigm—structures a team loosely and depends on individual initiative of the

team members

• Open paradigm—attempts to structure a team in a manner that achieves some of the

controls associated with the closed paradigm but also much of the innovation that occurs
when using the random paradigm

• Synchronous paradigm—relies on the natural compartmentalization of a problem and

suggested by Constantine [Con93]
organizes team members to work on pieces of the problem with little active communication
among themselves 8
 Avoid Team “Toxicity”

• A frenzied work atmosphere in which team members waste energy and lose focus on the
objectives of the work to be performed.
• High frustration caused by personal, business, or technological factors that cause friction
among team members.

• “Fragmented or poorly coordinated procedures” or a poorly defined or improperly chosen

process model that becomes a roadblock to accomplishment.

• Unclear definition of roles resulting in a lack of accountability and resultant finger-pointing.

• “Continuous and repeated exposure to failure” that leads to a loss of confidence and a
lowering of morale. 9
 Agile Teams
• Team members must have trust in one another.

• The distribution of skills must be appropriate to the problem.

• Mavericks may have to be excluded from the team, if team cohesiveness is to

be maintained.

• Team is “self-organizing”
• An adaptive team structure

• Uses elements of Constantine’s random, open, and synchronous paradigms

• Significant autonomy 10
 Team Coordination & Communication

• Formal, impersonal approaches include software engineering documents and work products (including source
code), technical memos, project milestones, schedules, and project control tools (Chapter 23), change requests
and related documentation, error tracking reports, and repository data (see Chapter 26).
• Formal, interpersonal procedures focus on quality assurance activities (Chapter 25) applied to software
engineering work products. These include status review meetings and design and code inspections.

• Informal, interpersonal procedures include group meetings for information dissemination and problem solving
and “collocation of requirements and development staff.”

• Electronic communication encompasses electronic mail, electronic bulletin boards, and by extension, video-
based conferencing systems.

• Interpersonal networking includes informal discussions with team members and those outside the project who
may have experience or insight that can assist team members. 11
 The Product Scope

• Scope
• Context. How does the software to be built fit into a larger system, product, or business context and
what constraints are imposed as a result of the context?
• Information objectives. What customer-visible data objects (Chapter 8) are produced as output from
the software? What data objects are required for input?
• Function and performance. What function does the software perform to transform input data into
output? Are any special performance characteristics to be addressed?

• Software project scope must be unambiguous and understandable at the

management and technical levels.
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 Problem Decomposition
• Sometimes called partitioning or problem elaboration

• Once scope is defined …

• It is decomposed into constituent functions

• It is decomposed into user-visible data objects

or

• It is decomposed into a set of problem classes

• Decomposition process continues until all functions or problem classes have

been defined
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 The Process
• Once a process framework has been established
• Consider project characteristics
• Determine the degree of rigor required
• Define a task set for each software engineering activity
• Task set =
• Software engineering tasks

• Work products

• Quality assurance points

• Milestones 14
Melding the Problem and the Process

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 The Project
• Software people don’t understand their customer’s needs.
• The product scope is poorly defined.

• Changes are managed poorly.

• The chosen technology changes.

• Business needs change [or are ill-defined].

• Deadlines are unrealistic.

• Users are resistant.

• Sponsorship is lost [or was never properly obtained].

• The project team lacks people with appropriate skills.

• Managers [and practitioners] avoid best practices and lessons learned. 16

 Common-Sense Approach to Projects
How does a manager act to avoid the problems just noted? Reel [Ree99] suggests a five-part
commonsense approach to software projects:
• Start on the right foot. This is accomplished by working hard (very hard) to understand the problem that is to
be solved and then setting realistic objectives and expectations.

• Maintain momentum. The project manager must provide incentives to keep turnover of personnel to an
absolute minimum, the team should emphasize quality in every task it performs, and senior management
should do everything possible to stay out of the team’s way.

• Track progress. For a software project, progress is tracked as work products (e.g., models, source code, sets of
test cases) are produced and approved (using formal technical reviews) as part of a quality assurance activity.

• Make smart decisions. In essence, the decisions of the project manager and the software team should be to
“keep it simple.”

• Conduct a postmortem analysis. Establish a consistent mechanism for extracting lessons learned for each
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project.
 The W5HH Principle :To Get To The Essence Of A Project

• Why is the system being developed?

• What will be done?

• When will it be accomplished?

• Who is responsible?

• Where are they organizationally located?

• How will the job be done technically and managerially?

• How much of each resource (e.g., people, software, tools, database) will be needed?
Barry Boehm [Boe96]

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 Critical Practices

• Formal risk management

• Empirical cost and schedule estimation

• Metrics-based project management

• Earned value tracking

• Defect tracking against quality targets

• People aware project management

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THANKS…

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