• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Project Management
 
Project management
Project management
is the ensemble of activities (such as tasks) concerned with successfullyachieving a set of goals. This includes planning, scheduling and maintaining progress of the activitiesthat comprise the 
project
. Reduced to its simplest project management is the discipline of maintaining the risk of failure at as low a value as necessary over the lifetime of the project. Risk of failure arises primarily from the presence of uncertainty at all stages of a project.An alternate point of view is that project management is the discipline of defining and achievingtargets while optimizing the use of resources (time, money, people, space, etc).Project management is quite often the province and responsibility of an individual project manager.This individual seldom participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to maintain the progress and productive mutual interaction of various parties in such a waythat overall risk of failure is reduced.
What is a project? 
A
project
could literally be as simple as making breakfast, but in the context of the practice of  project management a project is best defined as an undertaking with a discrete start, a discrete finish,and some complexity. Compare this to, say, a manufacturing line, which is intended to be acontinuous process without a planned end.Typical projects might include the engineering and construction of a building, or the design, coding,testing and documentation of a computer software program, or development of the science andclinical testing of a new drug. The
duration
of a project is the time from its start to its completion,which can take days, weeks, months or even years.
 Approaches
Generally, there are two approaches that can be taken to project management today. The "traditional"approach identifies a sequence of steps to be completed. This contrasts with theagile softwaredevelopmentapproach in which the project is seen as relatively small tasks rather than a complete process. The objective of this approach is to impose as little overhead as possible in the form of rationale, justification, documentation, reporting, meetings, and permission.
The traditional approach
In the traditional approach, we can distinguish 5 stages in the development of a project:1.project initiation2.
project planning
3.project production4.project monitoring5.project completion Not all projects will visit every stage as projects can be terminated before they reach completion.Some projects probably don't have the planning and/or the monitoring. Some projects will gothrough steps 2, 3 and 4 multiple times.Many industries utilize variations on these stages. For example, in bricks and mortar architecturaldesign, projects typically progress through stages like Pre-Planning, Conceptual Design, SchematicDesign, Design Development, Construction Drawings (or Contract Documents), and Construction
NH
2
 
Administration. While the names may differ from industry to industry, the actual stages typicallyfollow common steps to problem solving--defining the problem, weighing options, choosing a path,implementation and evaluation.Project management tries to gain control over four variables:
•
time
•
cost
•
quality
•
scope
(In project management,
scope
is the sum total of all projects  productsand their  features.)For example, the
 scope
of a variable refers to where in the program the variable can be accessedand/or modified. For a function, to where the function can be called, and so on.Common scope levels:
•
 global scope
:
visible from the entire program
•
 file scope
:
visible from a single source file.
•
local scope
:
visible only from the local function or block where the name was declared.Scope is usually hierarchical: a variable declared at local scope (for example, as alocal variable inside afunction) supersedes the same variable declared at global scope. All references to thisvariable inside the function will manipulate the locally-defined variable. Outside the function, theywill manipulate the globally-defined variable.Because of this automatic scope handling, careful management of variable, class and function namesshould be a requirement for any non-trivial program. It is considered good programming practice tomake variables as narrow a scope as feasible so that different parts of your program do notaccidentally interact with each other by modifying each other's variables. This also preventsActionat a distance. Common techniques for doing so are to have different sections of your program usedifferentnamespaces, or else make individual variables private through either dynamic variable scopingor lexical variable scoping.  Three of these variables can be given by external or internal customers. The value(s) of theremaining variable(s) is/are then set by project management, ideally based on solid estimationtechniques. The final values have to be agreed upon in a negotiation process between projectmanagement and the customer. Usually, the values in terms of time, cost, quality and scope arecontracted.To keep control over the project from the beginning of the project all the way to its naturalconclusion, a project manager uses a number of techniques
:project planning,earned value, risk  management,scheduling,process improvement.
Project planning
Project management
is the process to quantify the amount of time and budget a
project
will cost.The purpose of project planning is creating a
project plan
that a
project manager
can use to track the progress of his team.
NH
3
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...