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Class 5

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Md. Mahabub Alam Nishat
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7 views

Class 5

Uploaded by

Md. Mahabub Alam Nishat
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Software Project

Management
Dr. Md. Nasim Adnan
Optimizing a Plan
• In many situations, the project schedule ends up by being too long to
respect the constraints set by the stakeholders, by the project goals,
or by the environment.
• This can cause a bit of frustration to the project manager, since, as
soon as he or she comes out with a realistic plan, this has to be
revised and changed!
Renegotiating Goals and Deadlines
• If all the project goals cannot be achieved in the required time frame,
renegotiating the project scope and other project constraints can
yield a satisfactory solution.
• The simplest renegotiation we can try is on the delivery date.
• If the customer does not have a strong constraint on the delivery
date, acknowledging the actual work that has to be done and moving
the project delivery date to a more reasonable deadline is a simple
and elegant solution.
• Sometimes deadlines are set arbitrarily by the customer. In these
situations, using the plan to demonstrate that the deadline cannot be
achieved can convince the customer to come to more reasonable
terms.
• In other situations, deadlines are set earlier than necessary, as a
padding to protect other projects that might depend on our results. In
these cases, understanding the actual margins and the real risks of
delivering late can help both sides decide on the most appropriate
strategy.
• The second kind of renegotiation is on the project goals. Not all goals,
in fact, are equally important.
• Selecting with the client the most important goals reduces the work
we need to do, moving the delivery to an earlier date.
• If both approaches are not feasible, we need to change the logic of
the plan.
Phase the Project
• Organizing the project in phases allows one to organize work so that the most
important goals are achieved earlier. If only some of the project goals must be
achieved for a given deadline, phasing the project might help meet the
requirement.
• For software development projects, this can be an effective strategy, since
software development accommodates relatively easily an incremental
construction.
• Using this approach, the first phases will release an initial version of the
system with basic features. The system will then be refined in subsequent
project iterations.
• An additional advantage of this approach is that the user is given a working
solution to use: this allows both users and the development team to better
understand what functions are important and, consequently, how to prioritize
project development.
Project Crashing
• Project crashing is a technique that works on the project schedule
trying to find an optimal balance between time and costs.
• Project crashing works on the assumption that shortening a project
yields savings and that the duration of tasks can be reduced by
assigning more resources to them (labor, material, equipment).
• However, since an increment in resources causes an increase in
project costs, which could be nonlinear with the decrease in duration,
an optimal balance needs to be found between how much a project is
shortened and how much the costs are increased.
Fast Tracking
• Fast tracking tries to minimize the project duration by breaking the
logic of the plan.
• That is, some of the hard constraints in the plan are removed so that
activities that would otherwise be sequential can partially overlap.

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