CS5558 + CS5568

Software Project Planning and Control

Assignment 3
Kevin Rhynas
 Software Project Planning and Control – Assignment 3

Question

The purpose of this assignment is to look at the different ways in which projects are planned
and scheduled. To do that we need to have a sample project with which to work, and it needs
to include the estimates for the different parts. So go find one from work. You can use a
current one if you like, and in any case you only need the details of one iteration for this. This
will make the assignment more managable. If you don't work with iterations on your projects,
then add in a step to break up the project into what you would consider a managable iteration,
based on what you read in the course book.

First, describe what the project is and how the work breakdown schedule was derived for the
project. Be sure to explain any dependencies, or other constraints that are involved.

Second, look at the article by Ryan Shriver On Measurable Value and follow the link to the
pdf. Read through that, and apply it to the same iteration used above. Obviously, you can't go
and discuss things with the stakeholders to answer those questions. However, you can make
'best guess assumptions' from what you do know. So do that for the six steps he walks you
though in the case study with respect to your project. At the end of this you should know
what the objectives are, what scales and meters can be used to measure them, and also what
the best way would be to meet them.

Third, compare these results with what you discussed in the previous step, and come to some
overall conclusion about the different approaches.

This assignment needs to be no longer than 2500 words and is worth 25% of your marks for
the course.

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 Software Project Planning and Control – Assignment 3

The Project

The project that I’ll be analysing is a recent project called the client portal; this was used in the
previous essay. This project’s goal was to build a secure website for our clients as well as build
modules for management to access to update this information, maintain data on the main website
and view statistics of website visitors, downloads etc.

In terms of how the company operates when scheduling projects, we take a very traditional
approach to scheduling our projects, what I found when I asked around the office about how we
scheduled our projects was that we took the following approach:

Work Breakdown Schedule

So when we decided on the overall task at hand, we decided then to break down the work by
person, there were two people on this project, Kevin (myself) and peter. so we’d already decided
since our skill sets were totally different to break up the work into technical and graphical side of the
project. Secondly the specification is then looked and we break the work down into functional
sections, so for example in this project, we have the login page, welcome page, client portal area,
client profile section, etc. each of these pages need to be built to build the over all solution and each
piece of work can then be assessed in terms of time scale. As you can see for appendix A, this is
exactly what happened on this project. We broke the work down into each of the different pages.

This could have been further enhanced to our schedule by breaking the work down into functions, so
for example on the login page we could have broken this down into function such as, username and
password checking, password reset, access quest and the UI part of the page. So our work
breakdown schedule would be 4 layers, our top layer (the over all product) broken down between
two developers, then broken down into sections (pages) and then further broken down into
functions.

From here we can look at each of the functional items and estimate against them, hopefully because
we have broken down each item into functions for each of the webpage parts, we will have small
enough estimations (we tend to aim to break things down into less than 5 day blocks) however Joel
Spolsky in his article about evidence based scheduling states that :

“Setting a 16-hour maximum forces you to design the damn feature. If you have a hand-
wavy three week feature called “Ajax photo editor” without a detailed design, I’m sorry to be

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 Software Project Planning and Control – Assignment 3

the one to break it to you but you are officially doomed. You never thought about the steps
it’s going to take and you’re sure to be forgetting a lot of them. “

We certainly don’t take this approach of breaking work down into micro chunks, the obvious
advantage of spending this extra time to formulate the exact breakdown of methods and functions is
obvious as we will have properly planned out our implementation. However in the cases where we
don’t know fully what the end product will look like or do, or how we are going to achieve what our
end goal is, the approach taken in breaking down the work into pages/dialogs/functions might have
to do.

Measuring Value with Agile

Ryan Shiver, in his article entitled ‘measure value with agile’ (2009) makes the following
stages to planning your project using agile and making “valuable work for a worthy nonprofit.”

Step One – Identify Stakeholders, Objectives and Resources

So inorder to perform this first stage Shiver suggests we ask ourselves the following
questions.

“When faced with problems like these, I like to ask myself three questions:
 Who are my stakeholders?
 What are their objectives?
 What resources are available?”

I’ve identified the stakeholders as the following for this project.

Interested Party Current Relationship Role within the project

Peter Shields Business Owner Project Sponsor / Interest in project success

Richard Elrick Operations Manager Interest in project success

Peter Michie Development Lead Interest in project success / influence in the Project
Completion.

Development Team Development team Interest in project success / influence in the Project
Completion.

Peter Livesey Project Manager Interest in project success / influence in the Project
Completion.

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The objectives of this project were to provide customers with a place where we could point
existing customers to for support and information about the company and products, a
secure login for them to access their products via the web, however our overall objective
was to strengthen our relationship with our customers, this is because according to V Kumar,
the importance of sustaining successful customer management initiatives in the long run,
although it might be possible to keep customers happy and loyal in the short run, the greater
challenge often lies in achieving that objective with both growth and profits in the long run”.
We want to create a strong long term bond with our customers as it is universally known it is
easier to sell to existing customers than it is to sell to new customers.

Another of the objectives is also to reduce the amount of time the support team is spending
dealing with issues from customers as the portal should have a lot of FAQ, patches and also
allows customers to answer each other’s questions on a forum.

Finally this would also provide a good marketing tool to help promote sales, as our aftersales
reputation would increase with this level of support that we are offering our customers.

The resources for this project were a budget of approximately £40,000 and a time for
completion of 4 – 6 months using 2 developers, however this project was to be implemented
as well as other work that was being carried out.

Step Two – Quantifying our Objectives

So we’ve identified our stakeholders, resources and objectives, now Shriver says it is
important to make our objectives quantifiable because :
“It is through the process of trying to quantify objectives that we probe more deeply
into what’s really important”.
So we looked at our objectives above, lets break them down and look at how we can
measure each of these to make it more quantifiable.
Scale Meter

To increase our relationship with existing Measure the increase/decrease in sales from
customers and increase sales from existing existing clients
customers

Take the demands and pressure off of the support Tracking time spent on support by developers before
team the system was in place and after.

Increased market presence from increased after Measure the overall increase/decrease in sales
sale support. before and after the release of the portal

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Step 3: Identify targets, constraints and benchmarks

This step is to identify for “Everyone in the project needs to understand clearly what’s
success, what’s failure, and where the organization is today.”
Scale Targets Constraints Benchmarks

To increase our relationship with existing 25% growth 10% growth in £0.6m in sales from
customers and increase sales from existing in resale sales existing clients Q1 –
customers 4 2009

Take the demands and pressure off of the support 50% less 10% less time 3,900 man hours
team time spent spent on (approx..) spent on
on support support support last year

Increased market presence from increased after 20% more 10% custom 5 new clients in 2009
sale support. custom than than 2009
2009

Sources : BusinessPort financial reports

Step 4: Brainstorm design ideas
So in this stage we look at what the objectives are, what our targets are and what priorities
should be in terms of design. Obviously from our objectives the most important tasks are
increasing market and sales, (from the first and last objective) however this is being achieved
by better performing aftersales support which in term gives us our 2 nd objective. So
therefore our design was cantered around providing support through the portal, and also
with marketing and aftersales stuff being added afterwards, and allowing us to achieve our
objectives with one solution.
Step 5: Select the next best design
This step wasn’t really applicable as most of the design and specification came from the
majority stakeholders, so the project had a pretty clear direction.
Step 6: Agile integration
What was done here was an agile approach was taken in terms of what would be
implemented for the project, to see if the project was initially successful, this was prioritizing
the functionality that would be key to the success of the client portal initially and also key
functionality that will make the whole thing secure and useable. Then additional
functionality has been planned for a “phase 2” project.

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Comparing and Conclusion

Both approaches help to break down the work into smaller chunks, give us an overall plan for the
project and allow us to prioritize functionality however the work break down schedule approach
shows us very low level down to individual functions, which helps us to later work out how much
time can be assigned against each task.

However then when we look at the measurable value approach, this shows us a break down on the
project however focuses more on whats important to the project, as stated by Shriver in the article
“Delivering the right things and delivering things right” so this is all about delivering things that the
stakeholder/business/organisation want (getting the things in rght), rather than doing things 100%
correct, with excellent re-usable code (doing it right).

So to conclude I would say in terms of what our company would use is work break down structure as
this shows us exactly what needs to be done during the project, and also because it better fits in
with our project methodology.

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References –

 Evidence Based Scheduling - Joel Spolsky (2007)

Source: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

 Measurable Value with Agile - Ryan Shriver (2009)

Source : http://accu.org/var/uploads/journals/overload89.pdf

 Managing Customers for Profit: Strategies to Increase Profits and Build Loyalty - V. Kumar
(2008)


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Appendix A – Client Portal Schedule

Task Name Estimates (hours) Actuals (hours)

Design Phase
Write SDS 22.5 18.75
Review SDS 4 5
Total 26.5 23.75
Database Layer
Database Layer 37.5 45
Total 37.5 45
Data Layer
User Item 30 48.75
Database Interaction 22.5 26.25
Email notification Layer 15 22.5
Download Item 22.5 30
Reporting Tool Data Layer 22.5 15
Total 112.5 142.5
UI Layer
Login page 30 22.5
Web Part Development 52.5 70
Profile Pages 45 45
Management Portal 22.5 40
Reporting facility UI 24.5 40
Graphical Development 37.5 30
Contingency 37.5 7.5
Update Help Text 7.5 7.5
Total 257 262.5
System Testing
Update STS 30 36.25
Formal System Test 30 18.75
Rework 60 85.5
Rework - Pass 2 37.5 36.25
System Test contingency 22.5 7.5
Total 180 184.25
Delivery
Deployment Dry run 6 7.5
Actual Deployment 6 7.5
Total 12 15
Project Total 625.5 673

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