Software Project

Management
Dr. Md. Nasim Adnan
What is a Project
• Project Management Institute (2004) defines a project as a temporary
endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.
• The definition entails five important characteristics of a project, some
explicitly mentioned and some following as a consequence.
• The first characteristic is that a project is temporary, that is, it has a
beginning and an end.
• In many cases, determining the start and the end is easy. Consider the
following examples: a contract sign-off, a formal authorization to
proceed from senior management, a system going in production…
What is a Project
• In practice, however, many projects begin by slowly building up
resources and interest, while the official start happens sometime after
the resources and work have been invested.
• Others have residual work and activities going on after the official
end, for instance to follow up on defects and problems found in
project outputs.
• In all cases, however, projects have a start and a conclusion.
• The fact that a project is temporary has a natural consequence. Every
project will, in fact, have:
1. An initiating phase, during which the project infrastructure and the
project’s goals are drafted.
2. A planning phase, during which project goals are refined, activities
identified and scheduled, and many other support activities are properly
planned.
3. An executing phase, during which the actual work takes place. Running in
parallel, a monitoring phase measures the progress and raises flags when
plans and reality disagree.
4. A final closing phase, where the project outputs are handed out and the
project is closed.
• The amount and intensity of work in a project change according to
the project phase.
• The initiating and planning phases will require a relatively small
amount of work.
• Work will accumulate fast during the execution phase, many of which
are running in parallel. As the project gets near to its conclusion, work
will reduce and stop, of course, when the project delivers its outputs.
• The second characteristic is that a project delivers an output in the
form of a product, a service, or a capability. The outputs are tangible,
and often their properties are also measurable.
• Thus, a project can be set up and organized, starting from the
description and the characteristics of the outputs it delivers.
• Such description, in fact, entails the work that has to be done to build
the outputs.
• The description of the project outputs also defines the project
completion criteria: the project ends when the outputs are delivered
as specified.
• Things are not always so simple, however. Many projects have a clear
output, but the way in which this is achieved might not be clear.
• Consider, for instance, a situation in which we want to improve the
performances of a software system.
• The goal is clear, but the means to achieve it might not. In other
situations, the outputs might not be completely clear or well spelled
out.
• This is quite common in software development, where coming out
with a complete and unambiguous description of a system is not
always easy.
• The third characteristic is that projects are resource constrained. A
limited time is available to build the project outputs.
• Also limited will be other project resources, such as the budget and
the team.
• An important consequence is that the project manager and the team
have to find an achievable solution, while respecting all project
constraints.
• Thus, the output of a project is seldom the best possible solution but
rather the best solution given the constraints.
• The fourth characteristic is that a project requires a progressive
elaboration to build the project outputs.
• At the beginning, different ways are possible to achieve the project
goals. As we move along, many project activities require to take
choices, which reduce the degrees of freedom.
• Thus, the cost of changes increases as a project progresses, since the
amount of rework necessary to implement a change increases as we
reduce our degrees of freedom.
• The fifth and final characteristic is that a project delivers a unique
output. Thus, what a project delivers has some novelty, one way or
the other.
• This allows us to introduce the last important characteristic, namely,
that a project always has some risk coming in the form of menaces or
opportunities.
• Risks come from the unique characteristics of the project outputs,
which sometimes are not fully understood or not clear when a
project starts.
• Having seen the main qualities of a project, we need to mention that
not all work is a project. Work that is not a project is called
operational, even though one might still call it a project.
Programs, Subprojects, and Portfolios
• Projects come in different sizes. Small projects might require the work
of a few people for a few weeks or a few months. Larger projects
might involve the work of thousands of people for years.
• Consider, for instance, the development of the F22 fighter aircraft.
The development started in 1986 with a first phase to build two
prototypes, which lasted 50 months.
• After the demonstration of the prototypes and the selection of the
best model, the actual development started in 1991, with the first
production aircraft delivered in 2003. The total costs of the project
are estimated at 67.3 USD billion, in then-year dollars.
• Although in principle the development of the F22 could be organized
as a single project, a more practical approach organizes its
construction at different levels of abstraction and granularity.
• Projects are thus often organized and combined to achieve objectives
larger than those of any single initiative.
• A common classification distinguishes among portfolios, subprojects,
and programs.
• Programs: A program is a set of related projects managed in a
coordinated way. The underlying motivation is that coordination
allows one to achieve additional benefits.
• The most famous program is probably the U.S. manned space
program, which culminated with men landing on the moon.
• Subprojects: Complex projects for which program management is an
overkill can be organized and broken down into subprojects.
• A subproject is thus the way in which one can organize the
implementation of some specific objectives of a larger project.
• Portfolios: Organizations often use projects to develop similar
systems.
• The term portfolio management thus identifies a situation in which a
set of independent projects are coordinated to achieve better results.
What is a Software Project
• When we think about software projects, probably the first thing that
comes to mind is developing applications. Even when the main goal is
developing an application, coding is just one of many activities…
• In the following, we look at the main types of software-related
projects.
Application Development
• From the project management point of view, we can distinguish the following
types of applications:
• One-offs or bespoke systems that are software systems specifically created for a
customer.
• A bespoke system often implements a specific need of a customer, although in
some cases the customer base of the final product could be large.
• Some examples of bespoke systems include a luggage tracking software, a
compiler for a specific hardware platform, and a system to monitor a fleet of
trucks.
• For bespoke systems, the specification of the application to develop (more in
general of the project goals) will be driven and have to be agreed with the
customer.
• Off-the-shelf applications are software systems implementing a
function which is useful to many different users.
• It is the software we buy from marketplaces or stores and it is the
equivalent of a Toyota Corolla: one size fits all.
• The goals and functions of the applications, in this case, come from the
company developing the system, which sometimes conducts user
surveys, to better understand needs and features that are most useful.
• The main characteristic is that the system is the same for each user and
that the company developing the system sets the roadmap, choosing
when to upgrade, what functions to add, and when to do maintenance.
• Finally, a customized off-the-shelf application sits somewhere between
the two other types of applications.
• They are systems that are developed similar to off-the-shelf applications.
However, they need to (or can) be customized to fit the customer needs.
• An example of a customized off-the-shelf application is an Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) system. An ERP system helps plan the resources
of an organization and automate information management.
• While the engine of many ERPs is generic (and developed as an off-the-
shelf application), many other characteristics (modules to use, what data
has to be stored, how information flows) need to be customized for each
client.
Software Project Management
• Software project management is the integration of management
techniques into software development.
• The need for such integration has its root in the 1960s, in the days of
the “software crisis,” when practitioners recognized the increasing
complexity of delivering software products meeting the specifications.
• A number of works started then to improve the software
development practices, detailing and structuring technical activities
more rationally.
• Similar to system engineering, software engineering shares many
concerns that can be dealt with by sound management practices.
• As software engineering matured as a discipline, more interest grew
in the systematic integration of management activities in the software
production process.
• Software development and project management thus started to be
integrated more tightly. This is exactly what we start doing in this
course.