The Art of Project Management

1
The Art of Project Management

• Managing people
• Time and resource constraints
• Methodologies and tools
• Documentation and communication
• Customer and management expectations

• Technological change
• Systems development life cycle
• Organizational change and complexity
• Contractors and vendors

2
Project Initiation

• Establish Project Initiation Team
• Establish a relationship with the customer
• Establish the Project Initiation plan
• Establish management procedures
• Establish the project management environment and
  project workbook

3
Project Planning

• Differs from IS planning
• Define discrete activities and work needed to
  complete each activity
• Assumption-laden and iterative
• 10 elements to complete process
• May range from 10 pages to hundreds

4
Project Planning Elements

• Describing project scope, alternatives,
  feasibility
• What is problem?
• What needs to be done?
• How will success be measured?
• Divide project into manageable tasks
• Work breakdown structure
• Represent activities at right level of detail

5
Project Planning Elements

• Estimating resources and creating a plan
• Time and human resources main focus
• Decomposition
• Modeling
• Function point estimation
• Developing preliminary schedule
• Gantt or PERT chart

6
Project Planning Elements

• Developing a communication plan
• Management, team, customers
• Coordinating work
• Determining project standards and procedures
• Identifying and assessing risk
• Technological
• People-experience, availability

7
Project Planning Elements

• Creating a preliminary budget
• Cost/benefit analysis
• Developing a work statement
• Developed for customer
• Articulates deliverables
• Setting a baseline project plan
• Best estimate of of tasks and resources
• Update as work progresses, change occurs

8
Project Execution

• Executing baseline project plan
• Monitoring progress against plan
• Managing changes to baseline plan
• Maintaining project workbook
• Communicating project status

9
Closing Down the Project

• Natural versus unnatural
• Project close-down
• Post-project reviews
• Closing customer contract

10
COCOMO (Construction Cost Model)

• Based on delivered source instructions
• Lines of code
• Cost drivers include
• Product attributes
• Computer attributes
• Personnel attributes
• Project attributes
• Each cost driver rated and given a cost driver
  enabling a person-month calculation

11
Function Point Analysis

• Estimate project based on applications
• Functionality
• Size
• Complexity
• Identify data and transaction functions
• Determine the complexity of each function type
• Assess system characteristics to factor in
  complexity influence

12
Gantt Chart
13
PERT Chart
14
Developing PERT and Gantt charts

• Identify each project activity
• Determine time estimates and calculate the
  expected completion time for each activity
• Estimated time (optimistic 4 X realistic
  pessimistic)/6
• Determine sequence of activities and precedence
  relationships
• Determine the critical path
• TE earliest expected completion time (LEFT to
  RIGHT)
• TL latest expected completion time (RIGHT to
  LEFT)
• all activities with slack time (TL - TE) equal to
  zero are on the critical path

15
Project Management Challenges

• Change the Learning Curve
• Technology Change
• Business Change
• Size2 Workload Complexity
• Time/Resources - to Learn, Plan, Do
• Interdependence - Coordination, Control
  Interoperability

16
Strategies and Tactics

• Less is Better -- none, small, simple
• Match Job to Resources
• Consider Serial in place of Parallel
• Buy or Outsource if a Good Option
• Capital for Labor - DBMS, CASE.
• Use New Approaches if Better - Prototypes, Rapid
  Application Development, OOD