Software project planning and monitoring

The company we will interview for our report well be Netsol. We will ask questions to its development
department employees named The Innovation Group. The Innovation Group delivers profit
improvement solutions for the insurance and associated industries through technology and specialized
business process outsourcing solutions.
By conducting this interview we will learn following skills:
To understand what is project planning. To understand what are project panning life cycle
phases and methods.
To understand the feasibility of a project prior to implementation.
To understand the steps in defining project objectives and scope.
To understand the concepts of the Time Value of Money and Resources.
To understand who to eliminate constraints of Time/Cost/Performance Specification and
Resources on software during monitoring.

To understand who to schedule a project

To understand who to analyze risks associated with a project

The knowledge we get from this interview we will apply it in software development sector.

Planning
The overall goal of software project planning is to establish a pragmatic strategy for controlling, tracking,
and monitoring a complex technical project.
Why?
So the end result gets done on time, with quality.
Clear objectives lead to a higher rate of project success.
By taking the time to properly plan your project’s objectives, the tasks leading toward these
objectives are easily created.

Software project planning encompasses five major activities:
Estimation:
o

Scheduling:

Estimation determines — how much money, effort, resources, and time it will take to
build a specific system or product?

o

Scheduling determines — how do we allocate resources along the timeline? What are
the milestones?

Risk analysis:
o

Risk analysis determines —what can go wrong? How can we avoid it? What can we do
about it?

Quality and change management planning:
o

Control strategy determines —how do we control quality? How do we control change?

Task Set for Project Planning:
Software houses perform collection of planning task to get the solution of above mentioned questions,
these tasks are:
1) Establish project scope:
a) Understand the customer’s needs
b) understand the business context
c) understand the project boundaries
d) understand the customer’s motivation
e) understand the likely paths for change
After identifying the software scope you must ask two important questios:
1) Can we build software to meet this scope?
2) Is the project feasible?
2) Determine feasibility: To get the answer of send question we make feasibility of software.
Technical feasibility is important, but business need is more important. You should not develop
such software which will technically very high but no one wants to buy it.

Software feasibility has four dimensions
a) Technology – Is the project technically feasible? Is it within the state of the art? Can
defects be reduced to a level matching the application's needs?
b) Finance – Is is financially feasible? Can development be completed at a cost that the
software organization, its client, or the market can afford?
c) Time – Will the project's time-to-market beat the competition?
d) Resources – Does the software organization have the resources needed to succeed in
doing the project?

3) Analyze risks:
In the software project plan we perform following tasks to analyze the risks:
o
o
o
o
o
o

List the potential risks
Assign a probability to each risk (1 is low, 5 is high)
Assess the severity should the risk occur (1 is low, 5 is high)
Give each risk a score (probability time’s severity)
Plan how you will prevent risks happening (or manage them if they occur).
The highest scoring risks need to be considered and planned for in more detail.

Think about the risk analysis at the start of the project in order to prevent risks from happening.

4) Define required resources
a) Determine human resources required:
o

o

o

Planners need to select the number and the kind of people skills needed to
complete the project. They need to specify the organizational position and job
specialty for each person
Small projects of a few person-months may only need one individual. Large
projects spanning many person-months or years require the location of the
person to be specified also
The number of people required can be determined only after an estimate of the
development effort

b) Define reusable software resources:
Reusable software resources consist on following:

o
o
o
o

Off-the-shelf components
Full-experience components
Partial-experience components
New components

c) Identify environmental resources:
o
o

A software engineering environment (SEE) consists on hardware, software, and
network resources that required in developing and testing software product.
Most software organizations have many projects that require access to the SEE
provided by the organization. Planners must identify the time window required
for hardware and software and verify that these resources will be available

5) Estimate cost and effort
a) Decompose the problem
b) Develop two or more estimates using different approaches
c) Reconcile the estimates
6) Develop a project schedule
a) Establish a meaningful task set and milestones.
b) Use scheduling tools to develop a timeline chart
c) Define schedule tracking mechanisms
d) Identifies who is responsible for conducting each task
e) Specifies the inter-task dependencies

Monitoring:
The purpose of Project Monitoring and is to provide an understanding of the project’s progress so that
appropriate corrective actions can be taken when the project’s performance deviates significantly from
the plan.
Monitoring is used to oversee progress of software and generate reports. Reporting advises the correct
people at the correct time of positive and negative events, allowing for progression or remedial action
as appropriate.
Monitor the actual values of the project planning parameters against the project plan.
Monitor commitments against those identified in the project plan.
Monitor risks against those identified in the project plan.

Periodically review the project's progress, performance, and issues:
o Regularly communicate status on assigned activities and work products to
relevant stakeholders.
o Identify and document significant issues and deviations from the plan.
o Document change requests and problems identified in any of the work products
and processes.
o Document the results of the reviews.
o Track change requests and problem reports to closure.
Review the accomplishments and results of the project at selected project milestones:
o Conduct reviews at meaningful points in the project’s schedule, such as the
completion of selected stages, with relevant stakeholders.
o Review the commitments, plan, status, and risks of the project.
o Identify and document significant issues and their impacts.
o Document the results of the review, action items, and decisions.
o Track action items to closure

Corrective actions are managed to closure when the project's performance or results deviate
significantly from the plan:
o Gather issues for analysis
o Analyze issues to determine need for corrective action.Corrective action is
required when the issue, if left unresolved, may prevent the project from
meeting its objectives.

3. What process are you following for the study?

The Process following for studying
Software Engineering A P R A C T I T I O N E R ’ S A P P R O A C H edition 5 chapter 5 for
planning
for monitoring we study cmmi for development version 1.2 "project monitorinl and
control (PMc) "

Questions for Project Planning
How long you have been working in industry?
How long you have been working in this company?
What is your job title?
Are you using any tool to manage planning? If yes, then which tool you use for managing
the planning?
Which steps you used for project planning? And what is their order?
Are resources provided for the planning software project?
If you fail in project planning who guide you?
Do you set the team road map? If Yes, then who divide the task, do you divide the task
equally or according to the capacity of employees?
Do affected groups and individuals agree their commitments related to the software
project?
Do you use the same team for all projects or do you assign different team to different
project.
How you evaluate project success?
Which software matrices you used for project cost, time and effort estimation?
For which kind of software you perform risk analysis before checking the quality of
software and after checking the quality of software? What are their benefits?
While understanding the scope of software with clients, does you makes developer
team leads part of that meeting?

Questions for monitoring
Name the activities/steps you perform for monitoring your project. What are the order
of the steps/activates?
Who perform the monitoring activities? Do you have a separate team for monitoring or
the team who developed the software?
How you create framework for monitoring?
How you perform monitoring in your project? Are you using some tool or you update
your project file manually?
In monitoring which time estimation is good one? Daily weekly or monthly?
Does the project follow a written organization policy for monitoring the software the
project?
How you deal with the delays if any occur?

If you are behind the schedule what will you do? You make another plan to reach the
target or stick with the old one?
which resources you are using for monitoring the project ?

Refrences
http://www.brighthubpm.com/project-planning/20136-examples-of-project-planningobjectives/
http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/comm_planning/affordablehousin
g/training/web/checkup/monitoring/monitoringobjectives

Software project planning and monitoring

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