Unit-1 Introduction to software project management

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Introduction
A Software Project Management is the complete procedure of software
development from requirement gathering to testing and maintenance, managing
based on the execution methodologies, in a specified period of time to achieve
intended software product.
Why is software project management important?

• First there is a question of money. A lot of money is at stake with ICT

projects.
• The United kingdom during the financial year 2002-2003, the central
government spent more on contracts for ICT projects than contracts related
to roads.
• Unfortunately, all projects are not successful.
• In a report published in 2003, the United States analyzed 13,522 projects
and concluded that only a third of projects were successful; 82% of projects
were late and 43% exceeded their budget.
• The national audit office in the UK, they found reason to failure: lack of
skill, proven approach to project management and risk management.

Software Project Management is important because of following reasons:

1. Clear Focus & Objective: Project management is important because it
ensures there’s a proper plan for executing on strategic goals.
2. Budget: In real Project lot of money is invested in terms of resources. Each
project comes with a cost which is included in a budget along with
contingencies and profit. A project manager’s goal is to keep the actual cost
below, or at least at, the estimated cost in order to maximize the profit earned
by the company for the project.
3. Strategic Alignment: Project management is important because it ensures
there’s rigor in architecting projects properly so that they fit well within the
broader context of our client’s strategic frameworks Good project
management ensures that the goals of projects closely align with the strategic
goals of the business.
4. Leadership and Direction: Project management is important because it
brings leadership and direction to projects. Without project management, a
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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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team can be like a ship without a rudder; moving but without direction, control
or purpose.
5. Realistic Project Planning: Project management is important because it
ensures proper expectations are set around what can be delivered, by when,
and for how much.
Without good project management, projects get delivered late, and over
budget. Effective project managers should be able to negotiate reasonable and
achievable deadlines and milestones across stakeholders, teams, and
management.
6. Quality Control: Projects management is important because it ensures the
quality of whatever is being delivered, consistently hits the mark. Project
management is of key importance to Quality Assurance because it allows for
a staggered and phased process, creating time for teams to examine and test
their outputs at every step along the way.
7. Risk Management: Project management is important because it ensures
risks are properly managed and mitigated against to avoid becoming issues.
Good project management practice requires project managers to carefully
analyse all potential risks to the project, quantify them, develop a mitigation
plan against them, and a contingency plan should any of them materialize.
8. Orderly Process: Project management is important because it ensures the
right people do the right things, at the right time – it ensures proper project
process is followed throughout the project lifecycle.
9. Subject Matter Expertise: Project management is important because
someone needs to be able to understand if everyone’s doing what they should.
What is a project
A project is defined as a sequence of tasks that must be completed to attain
a certain outcome. In other words, Project being a planned activity.
• The emphasis on being planned assumes we can determine how to carry
out a task before we start.
• Planning is in essence thinking carefully about something before you do it.
• Even with uncertain projects this is worth doing as long as the resulting
plans are seen as provisional.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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• Other activities, such as routine maintenance, will have been performed so

many times that everyone knows exactly what to do.
• In these cases, planning hardly seems necessary, although procedures
might be documented to ensure consistency and to help newcomers.
• The activities that benefit most from conventional project management are
likely to lie between these two extremes - see Figure
• There is a hazy boundary between the non-routine project and the routine
job.
• The first time you do a routine task it will be like a project. On the other
hand, a project to develop a system similar to previous ones that you have
developed will have a large element of the routine.

• The following characteristics distinguish projects:

• non-routine tasks are involved;
• planning is required;
• specific objectives are to be met or a specified product is to be created;
• the project has a predetermined time span;
• work is carried out for someone other than yourself;
• work involves several specialisms;
• people are formed into a temporary work group to carry out the task;
• work is carried out in several phases;
Software project versus other types of project
Fred Brooks identified some characteristics of software projects which make
them particularly difficult:

Characteristics Other types of project Software Project

Invisibility When a physical artefact With software, progress
such as a bridge is is not immediately
constructed, the progress visible. Software project
can actually be seen. management can be seen

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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as the process of making

the invisible visible.

Complexity Construction will be Per dollar, pound or euro

there within the spent, software products
country.so it won’t take contain more complexity
much complexity
Conformity The 'traditional' engineer Software developers
usually works with have to conform to the
physical systems and requirements of human
materials like cement clients. It is not just that
and individuals can be
steel. These physical inconsistent.
systems have
complexity, but are
governed by consistent
physical laws.
Flexibility The other types of • That software is
projects are difficult to easy to change is
change the constructed seen as a strength.
project. • However, where
the software
system inter-faces
with a physical or
organizational
system. Thus,
software systems
are particularly
subject to change.

Contract Management and Technical Project Management

• In-house projects are where the users and the developers of new software
work for the same organization.
• However, increasingly organizations contract out ICT development to
outside developers.
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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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• Here, the client organization will often appoint a 'project manager' to

supervise the contract who will delegate many technically oriented
decisions to the contractors.
• Thus, the project manager will not worry about estimating the effort needed
to write individual software components as long as the overall project is
within the budget and on time.
• On the other supplier side there will need a project manager who deal with
the more technical issues.
Activities covered by software project management

There are three successive process that bring a new system into being-see figure

1. The feasibility study

• assesses whether a project is worth starting - that it has a valid
business case
• Information is gathered about the requirements of the proposed
application.
• Requirements elicitation can, at least initially, be complex and
difficult.
• The stakeholders may know the aims they wish to pursue, but not be
sure about the means of achievement.
• The developmental and operational costs, and the value of the
benefits of the new system, will also have to be estimated.
• With a large system, the feasibility study could be a project in its
own right with its own plan.
• The study could be part of a strategic planning exercise examining a
range of potential software developments.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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• Sometimes an organization assesses a programme of development

made up of a number of projects.
2. Planning
• If the feasibility study indicates that the prospective project appears
viable, then project planning can start.
• For larger projects, we would not do all our detailed planning at the
beginning.
• We create an outline plan for the whole project and a detailed one
for the first stage.
3. Project execution
• The project can now be executed. The execution of a project often
contains design and implementation sub-phases.
• Students new to project planning often find that the boundary
between design and planning can be hazy.
• Design is making decisions about the form of the products to be
created.
• This could relate to the external appearance of the software, that is,
the user interface, or the internal architecture.
• The plan details the activities to be carried out to create these
products.
• Planning and design can be confused because at the most detailed
level, planning decisions are influenced by design decisions.

Thus, a software product with five major components is likely to require five sets
of activities to create them.

Figure shows the typical sequence of software development activities

recommended in the international standard ISO 12207. Some activities are
concerned with the system while others relate to software.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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Requirements analysis
✓ starts with requirements elicitation or requirements gathering which
establishes what the potential users and their managers require of the new
system.
✓ It could relate to a function that the system should do something.
✓ It could be a quality requirement - how well the functions must work.
✓ An example of this is dispatching an ambulance in response to an
emergency telephone call. In this case transaction time would be affected
by hardware and software performance as well as the speed of human
operation.
✓ Training to ensure that operators use the computer system efficiently is an
example of a system requirement for the project, as opposed to a
specifically software requirement.
✓ There would also be resource requirements that relate to application
development costs.
Architecture design
✓ the components of the new system that fulfil each requirement have to be
identified.
✓ Existing components may be able to satisfy some requirements.
✓ In other cases, a new component will have to be made.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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✓ These components are not only software: they could be new hardware or
work
processes.
✓ Although software developers are primarily concerned with software
components, it is very rare that these can be developed in isolation.
✓ The design of the system architecture is thus an input to the software
requirements.
✓ A second architecture design process then takes place that maps the
software requirements to software components.
Detailed design
✓ Each software component is made up of a number of software units that
can be
separately coded and tested.
✓ The detailed design of these units is carried out separately.
Code and test
✓ Refers to writing code for each software unit.
✓ Initial testing to debug individual software units would be carried out at
this stage.
Integration
✓ The components are tested together to see if they meet the overall
requirements.
✓ Integration could involve combining different software components, or
combining and testing the software element of the system in conjunction
with the hardware platforms and user interactions.
Qualification testing
✓ The system, including the software components, has to be tested carefully
to
ensure that all the requirements have been fulfilled.
Installation
✓ This is the process of making the new system operational. It would include
activities such as setting up standing data , setting system parameters,
installing the software onto the hardware platforms and user training.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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Acceptance support
✓ This is the resolving of problems with the newly installed system, including
the
correction of any errors, and implementing agreed extensions and
improvements.
✓ Software maintenance can be seen as a series of minor software projects.
In many environments, most software development is in fact maintenance.
Plans, Methods and Methodologies
A plan for an activity must be based on some idea of a method of work. For
example, if you were asked to test some software, you may know nothing about
the software to be tested, but you could assume that you would need to:
✓ analyse the requirements for the software;
✓ devise and write test cases that will check that each requirement has been
satisfied.
✓ create test scripts and expected results for each test case:
✓ compare the actual results and the expected results and identify
discrepancies.

✓ While a method relates to a type of activity in general, a plan takes that and
converts it to real activities, identifying for each activity:
• its start and end dates;
• who will carry it out;
• what tools and materials - including information - will be needed.
The output from one method might be the input to another. Groups of
methods or techniques are often grouped into methodologies such as
object-oriented design.

Some Ways of Categorizing Software Projects

✓ Projects may differ because of the different technical products to be
created.
✓ Thus, we need to identify the characteristics of a project which could affect
the way in which it should be planned and managed.
Compulsory versus voluntary users
In workplaces there are systems that staff have to use if they want to do
something, such as recording a sale.
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Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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✓ However, use of a system is increasingly voluntary, as in the case of

computer games.
✓ Here it is difficult to elicit precise requirements from potential users as we
could with a business system.
✓ What the game will do will thus depend much on the informed ingenuity
of the developers, along with techniques such as market surveys, focus
groups and prototype evaluation.
Information systems versus embedded systems

✓ A traditional distinction has been between information systems which

enable staff to
are also called carry out office processes and embedded systems which
control machines.
✓ A stock control system would be an information system.
✓ An embedded, or process control, system might control the air conditioning
equipment in a building.
✓ Some systems may have elements of both where, for example, the stock
control system also controls an automated warehouse.
Outsourced projects

✓ While developing a large project, sometimes, it makes good commercial

sense for a company to outsource some parts of its work to other
companies.
✓ There can be several reasons behind such a decision. For example, a
company may consider outsourcing as a good option, if it feels that it does
not have sufficient expertise to develop some specific parts of the product
or if it determines that some parts can be developed cost effectively by
another company.
✓ Since an outsourced project is a small part of some project, it is usually
small in
size and needs to be completed within a few months.
✓ Considering these differences between an outsourced project and a
conventional project, managing an outsourced project entails special
challenges.
✓ Indian software companies excel in executing outsourced software projects
and have earned a fine reputation in this field all over the world.
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Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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✓ The type of development work being handled by a company can have an

impact on its profitability.
✓ For example, a company that has developed a generic software product
usually gets an uninterrupted stream of revenue over several years.
✓ However, outsourced projects fetch only one time revenue to any company.

Objective-driven development

✓ Projects may be distinguished by whether their aim is to produce a product

or to meet certain objectives.
✓ A project might be to create a product, the details of which have been
specified by the
as organization client.
✓ The client has the responsibility for justifying the product.
✓ On the other hand, the project requirement might be to meet certain
objectives which
could be met in a number of ways.
✓ An organization might have a problem and ask a specialist to recommend
a solution.
✓ Many software projects have two stages.
❖ First is an objective-driven project resulting in recommendations.
➢ This might identify the need for a new software system.
❖ The next stage is a project actually to create the software product.
➢ This is useful where the technical work is being done by an
external group and the user needs are unclear at the outset.
➢ The external group can produce a preliminary design at a fixed
fee. If the design is acceptable the developers can then quote a
price for the second, implementation, stage based on an agreed
requirement.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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Stakeholders
These are people who have a stake or interest in the project. Stakeholders can be
categorized as:

✓ Internal to the project team This means that they will be under the direct
managerial control of the
project leader.
✓ External to the project team but within the same organization For example,
the project leader might need the assistance of the users to carry out
systems testing. Here the commitment of the people involved has to be
negotiated.
✓ External to both the project team and the organization External
stakeholders may be customers who will benefit from the system that the
project implements. They may be contractors who will carry out work for
the project. The relationship here is usually based on a contract.

Different types of stakeholder may have different objectives and one of the
jobs of
the project leader:
✓ Is to recognize these different interests and to be able to reconcile them.
✓ For example, end-users may be concerned with the ease of use of the new
application, while their managers may be more focused on staff savings.
✓ The project leader therefore needs to be a good communicator and
negotiator
✓ Project managers can sometimes miss an important stakeholder group,
especially
in unfamiliar business contexts.
✓ Given the importance of coordinating the efforts of stakeholders, the
recommended
practice is for a communication plan to be created at the start of a project.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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Setting Objectives
• Among all these stakeholders are those who actually own the project. They
control the financing of the project.
• They also set the objectives of the project. The objectives should define
what the project team must achieve for project success.
• Although different stakeholders have different motivations, the project
objective
identify the shared intentions for the project.
• Objectives focus on the desired outcomes of the project rather than the
tasks within it - they are the post-conditions of the project.
• Informally the objectives could be written as a set of statements following
the opening
words “the project will be a success if... “
• Thus, one statement in a set of objectives might be “customers can order
our products online” rather than “to build an e-commerce website”.
• There is often more than one way to meet an objective and the more
possible routes to success the better
• There may be several stakeholders, including users in different business
areas, who might have some claim to project ownership.
• In such a case, a project authority needs to be explicitly identified with
overall authority over the project.
• This authority is often a project steering committee (or project board or
project
management board) with overall responsibility for setting, monitoring and
modifying
objectives.
• The project manager runs the project on a day-to-day basis, but regularly
reports to the steering committee.

Sub-objectives and goals

• An effective objective for an individual must be something that is within

the control
of that individual.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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• An objective might be that the software application produced must pay for
itself by reducing staff costs.
• As an overall business objective this might be reasonable.
• For software developers it would be unreasonable as any reduction in
operational staff costs depends not just on them but on the operational
management of the delivered system.
• A more appropriate goal or sub-objective for the software developers
would be to keep development costs within a certain budget.
• We can say that in order to achieve the objective we must achieve certain
goals or sub-objectives first.
• These are steps on the way to achieving an objective, just as goals scored
in a football match are steps towards the objective of winning the match.
Informally this can be expressed as a set of statements following the words
“To reach objective., the following must be in place”.

• The mnemonic SMART is sometimes used to describe well-defined

objectives:

➢ Specific Effective objectives are concrete and well defined. Vague

aspirations
such as "to improve customer relations' are unsatisfactory.
Objectives should be defined so that it is obvious to all whether the
project has been successful.
➢ Measurable Ideally there should be measures of effectiveness
which tell us how successful the project has been.
o For example, 'to reduce customer complaints' would be more
satisfactory as an objective than "to improve customer
relations'
o The measure can, in some cases, be an answer to simple
yes/no question, e.g. “Did we install the new software by I
June?”

➢ Achievable It must be within the power of the individual or group

to achieve the objective.
➢ Relevant The objective must be relevant to the true purpose of the
project.\

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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➢ Time constrained There should be a defined point in time by which

the

Measures of effectiveness

➢ Measures of effectiveness provide practical methods of checking that an

objective has been met.
➢ 'Mean time between failures' (mtbf) might, for example, be used to
measure reliability.
➢ This is a performance measurement and, as such, can only be taken once
the system is operational.
➢ Project managers want to get some idea of the performance of the
completed system as it is being constructed.
➢ They will therefore seek predictive measures. For example, a large number
of errors found during code inspections might indicate potential problems
with reliability later.

The Business Case

➢ Most projects need to have a justification or business case:

➢ the effort and expense of pushing the project through must be seen to be
worthwhile in terms of the benefits that will eventually be felt.
➢ A cost-benefit analysis will often be part of the project's feasibility study.
➢ This will itemize and quantify the project's costs and benefits.
➢ The benefits will be affected by the completion date:
➢ the sooner the project is completed, the sooner the benefits can be
experienced.
Any project plan must ensure that the business case is kept intact. For example:

• that development costs are not allowed to rise to a level which threatens to
exceed the value of benefits;
• that the features of the system are not reduced to a level where the expected
benefits cannot be realized;

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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• that the delivery date is not delayed so that there is an unacceptable loss of
benefits.

Project Success and Failure

• The project plan should be designed to ensure project success by
preserving the business case for the project
• We can distinguish between project objectives and business objectives
• The project objectives are the targets that the project team is expected to
achieve.
• In the case of software projects, they can usually be summarized as
delivering:
• the agreed functionality
• to the required level of quality
• on time
• within budget.

• A project could meet these targets but the application, once delivered could
fail to meet the business case.
• A computer game could be delivered on time and within budget, but might
then not sell.
• A commercial website used for online sales could be created successfully,
but customers might not use it to buy products, because they could buy the
goods more cheaply elsewhere.
• We have seen that in business terms it can generally be said that a project
is a success if the value of benefits exceeds the costs.
• We have also seen that while project managers have considerable control
over development costs, the value of the benefits of the project deliverables
is dependent on external factors such as the number of customers.
• Project objectives still have some bearing on eventual business success.
• Increasing development costs reduce the chances of the delivered
product being profitable.
• A delay in completion reduces the amount of time during which benefits
can be generated and diminishes the value of the project.
• A project can be a success on delivery but then be a business failure, On
the other hand, a project could be late and over budget, but its deliverables

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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could still, over time, generate benefits that outweigh the initial
expenditure.
• Some argue that the possible gap between project and business concerns
can be reduced by having a broader view of projects that includes business
issues.
• For example, the project management of an e-commerce website
implementation could plan activities such as market surveys, competitor
analysis, focus groups, prototyping, and evaluation by typical potential
users - all designed to reduce business risks.
• Because the focus of project management is, not unnaturally, on the
immediate project, it may not be seen that the project is actually one of a
sequence.
• Later projects benefit from the technical skills learnt on earlier projects.
• Technical learning will increase costs on the earlier projects, but later
projects benefit as the learnt technologies can be deployed more quickly,
cheaply and accurately.
• This expertise is often accompanied by additional software assets, for
example reusable code.
• Where software development is outsourced, there may be immediate
savings, but these longer-term benefits of increased expertise will be lost.
• managers may assess which areas of technical expertise it would be
beneficial to develop.
• Customer relationships can also be built up over a number of projects.
• If a client has trust in a supplier who has done satisfactory work in the past,
they are more likely to use that company again, particularly if the new
requirement builds on functionality already delivered.
• It is much more expensive to acquire new clients than it is to retain existing
ones.
What is Management?
Management involves the following activity:

➢ planning - deciding what is to be done;

➢ organizing - making arrangements;
➢ staffing - selecting the right people for the job etc.
➢ directing - giving instructions;
➢ monitoring - checking on progress;
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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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➢ controlling - taking action to remedy hold-ups;

➢ innovating - coming up with new solutions;
➢ representing - liaising with clients, users, developer, suppliers and other
stakeholders.

• Much of the project manager's time is spent on only three of the eight
identified activities, viz., project planning, monitoring, and control.
• The time period during which these activities are carried out is indicated
in Fig.
• It shows that project management is carried out over three well-defined
stages or process irrespective of the methodology used.
• In the project initiation stage, an initial plan is made. As the project starts,
the project is monitored and controlled to proceed as planned.
• However, the initial plan is revised periodically to accommodate additional
details and constraints about the project as they become available.
• Finally, the project is closed. In the project closing stage, all activities are
logically completed and all contracts are formally closed.

• Initial project
o planning is undertaken immediately after the feasibility study phase
and before starting requirements analysis and specification process.
Figure shows this project initiation period.
o Initial project planning involves estimating several characteristics of
a project.
o Based on these estimates, all subsequent project activities are
planned.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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o The initial project plans are revised periodically as the project

progresses
more project data becomes available.
o Once the project execution starts, monitoring and control activities
taken up to ensure that the project execution proceeds as planned.
o The monitoring activity involves monitoring the progress of the
project.
o Control activities are initiated to minimize any significant variation
in the plan
• Project planning
o is an important responsibility of the project manager.
o During project planning, the project manager needs to perform a few
well-defined activities that have been outlined
o which refers to their publication 'A Guide to the Project
Management Body of Knowledge?
• Estimation The following project attributes are estimated.
• Cost How much is it going to cost to complete the project?
• Duration How long is it going to take to complete the project?
• Effort How much effort would be necessary for completing the
project?

o The effectiveness of all activities such as scheduling and staffing,

which are planned at a later stage, depends on the accuracy with
which the above three project parameters have been estimated.
• Scheduling Based on estimations of effort and duration, the
schedules for manpower and other resources
are developed.
• Staffing Staff organization and staffing plans are made.
• Risk Management This activity includes risk identification,
analysis, and abatement planning.
• Miscellaneous Plans This includes making several other plans
such as quality assurance plan, configuration management plan, etc.
• Project monitoring and control activities are undertaken after the
initiation of development activities.
o The aim of project monitoring and control activities is to ensure that
the software development proceeds as planned.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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o While carrying out project monitoring and control activities, a

project manager may sometimes find it necessary to change the plan
to cope with specific situations and make the plan more accurate as
more project data becomes available.
o At the start of a project, the project manager does not have complete
knowledge about the details of the project.
o As the project progresses through different development phases, the
manager's information base gradually improves.
o The complexities of different project activities become clear, some
of the anticipated risks get resolved, and new risks appear.
o The project parameters are re-estimated periodically incorporating
new understanding and change in project parameters.
o By taking these developments into account, the project manager can
plan subsequent activities more accurately with increasing levels of
confidence.
o Figure shows this aspect as iterations between monitoring and
control, and the plan revision activities.
Management Control

• Management, in general, involves setting objectives for a system and

then monitoring the performance of the system.
• In Figure the 'real world' is shown as being rather formless. Especially
in the case of large undertakings, there will be a lot going on about
which management should be aware.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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• This will involve the local managers in data collection. Bare details,
such as location X has processed 2000 documents', will not be very
useful to higher management: data processing will be needed to
transform this raw data into useful information.
• This might be in such forms as percentage of records processed',
'average
documents processed per day per person' and estimated completion
date'.
• In our example, the project management might examine the 'estimated
completion date for completing data transfer for each branch. These can
be checked against the overall target date for completion of this phase
of the project.
• In effect they are comparing actual performance with one aspect of the
overall project objectives.
• They might find that one or two branches will fail to complete the
transfer of details in time.
• They would then need to consider what to do.
• One possibility would be to move staff temporarily from one branch to
another.
• If this is done, there is always the danger that while the completion date
for the one branch is pulled back to before the overall target date, the
date for the branch from which staff are being moved is pushed forward
beyond that date.
• The project manager would need to calculate carefully what the impact
would be in moving staff from particular branches.
• This is modelling the consequences of a potential solution.
• Several different proposals could be modelled in this way before one
was chosen for implementation.
• Having implemented the decision, the situation needs to be kept under
review by collecting and processing further progress details.
• For instance, the next time that progress is reported, a branch to which
staff have been transferred could still be behind in transferring details.
• This might be because the reason why the branch has got behind in
transferring details is because the manual records are incomplete and
another department, for

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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whom the project has a low priority, has to be involved in providing the
missing information.
• In this case, transferring extra staff to do data inputting will not have
accelerated data transfer.
• It can be seen that a project plan is dynamic and will need constant
adjustment during the execution of the project.
• Courses and books on project management often focus considerable
attention
on project planning.
• While this is to be expected, with nearly all projects much more time is
spent actually doing the project rather than planning it.
• A good plan provides a foundation for a good project, but is nothing
without intelligent execution.
• The original plan will not be set in stone but will be modified to take
account of changing circumstances.
Traditional versus Modern Project Management Practices

Over the last two decades, the basic approach taken by the software industry to
develop software has undergone a radical change.
• Software development projects are increasingly being based on either
tailoring some existing product or reusing certain pre-built libraries.
• In either case, two important goals of recent life cycle models are
maximization of code reuse and compression of project durations.
• Other goals include facilitating and accommodating client feedbacks and
customer participation in project development work, and incremental
delivery of the product with evolving functionalities.
• Change requests from customers are encouraged, rather than circumvented.
• Clients on the other hand, are demanding further reductions in product
delivery times and costs.
• These recent developments have changed project management practices in
many significant ways.

• In the following section, we will discuss some important differences

between modern project management practices and traditional practices.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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o Planning Incremental Delivery

▪ Few decades ago, projects were much simpler and therefore
more
predictable than the present-day projects.
▪ In those days, projects were planned with sufficient detail,
much before the actual project execution started.
▪ After the project initiation, monitoring and control activities
were carried out to ensure that the project execution
proceeded as per plan.
▪ Now, projects are required to be completed over a much
shorter duration, and rapid application development and
deployment are considered key strategies.
▪ The traditional long-term planning has given way to adaptive
short-term planning.
▪ Instead of making long term project completion plan the
project manager now plans all incremental deliveries with
evolving functionalities.
▪ This type of project management is often called extreme
project management.
▪ Extreme project management is a highly flexible approach to
project management that concentrates on the human side of
project management rather than formal and complex planning
and monitoring techniques.

o Quality Management
▪ Of late, customer awareness about product quality has
increased significantly.
▪ Tasks associated with quality management have become an
important responsibility of the project manager.
▪ The key responsibilities of a project manager now include
assessment of project progress and tracking the quality of all
intermediate artifacts. •
o Change Management
▪ Earlier, when the requirements were signed off by the
customer, any changes to the requirements were rarely
entertained.

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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022
Unit-1 Introduction to software project management
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▪ Customer suggestions are now actively being solicited and

incorporated throughout the development process.
▪ To facilitate customer feedback, incremental delivery models
are popularly being used.
▪ Product development is being carried out through a series of
product versions implementing increasingly greater
functionalities.
▪ Also, customer feedback is solicited on each version for
incorporation.
▪ This has made it necessary for an organization to keep track
of the various versions and revisions through which the
product develops.
▪ Another reason for the increased importance of keeping track
of the versions and revisions is the following.
▪ Application development through customization has become
a popular business model.
▪ Therefore, existence of a large number of versions of a
product and the need to support these by a development
organization has become common.
▪ In this context, the project manager plays a key role in product
base lining and version control.
▪ This has made change management a crucial responsibility of
the project manager.
▪ Change management is also known as configuration
management.
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Dept_MCA Mrs.RakshithaP_Assistant_Professor 2022