Project Management Concepts

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 The 4 P’s in Mgmt Spectrum

 People:
 The most important element of a successful project.
 Organizations that achieve high levels of maturity in the people management area have a higher
likelihood of implementing effective S.E. practices.
 Product:
 The software to be built.
 The S/W developer and customer must meet to define product objectives and scope.
 Objectives identify the overall goals for the product “customer’s viewpoint” without considering how
the goals will be achieved.
 Scope identifies the primary data, functions, and behaviors that characterize the product.
 Once objectives and scope are understood, alternative solutions are considered.
 Process:
 The set of framework activities and software engineering tasks “milestones, Q.A.” to get the job
done.
 Project:
 All work required to make the product a reality.
 Industry indicated that 26% of S/W projects failed outright and 46% experienced cost and schedule
overruns.

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 People
1. The Stakeholders:

 Senior managers: who define the business issues that often have significant influence on the
project.
 Project (technical) managers: who must plan, motivate, organize, and control the practitioners
who do software work.
 Practitioners: who deliver the technical skills that are necessary to engineer a product or
application.
 Customers: who specify the requirements for the software to be engineered and other
stakeholders who have a peripheral interest in the outcome.
 End-users: who interact with the software once it is released for production use.

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 Software Teams
How to lead?
How to organize?
How to collaborate?

How to motivate? How to create good ideas?

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2. Team Leaders:

 The MOI Model “Jerry Weinberg”

 Motivation. The ability to encourage (by “push or pull”) technical people to produce to their
best ability.
 Organization. The ability to mold existing processes (or invent new ones) that will enable
the initial concept to be translated into a final product.
 Ideas or innovation. The ability to encourage people to create and feel creative even when
they must work within bounds established for a particular software product or application.
 The Software project manager should concentrate on understanding the problem to be
solved.
 The project manager must let the team know that quality counts and that it will not be
compromised.
 The project manager must take charge of the project and allow good technical people to
follow their instincts.
 A manager must reward initiative and accomplishment and demonstrate through his own
actions that controlled risk taking will not be punished.
 An effective manager must be able to read people; he/she must be able to understand verbal
and nonverbal signals and react to the needs of people sending these signals.
 The manager must remain under control in high-stress situations.

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 3. Software Teams

“Not every group is a team, and not every team is effective.” Glenn Parker
The following factors must be considered when selecting a software project team structure ...

 The difficulty of the problem to be solved

 The size of the resultant program(s) in lines of code or function points
 The time that the team will stay together (team lifetime)
 The degree to which the problem can be modularized
 The required quality and reliability of the system to be built
 The rigidity of the delivery date
 The degree of sociability (communication) required for the project
 “if you want to be incrementally better: Be competitive. If you want to be exponentially better:
Be cooperative”

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Organizational Paradigms

 closed paradigm:
 structures a team along a traditional hierarchy of authority.
 Such teams can work well when producing S/W that is quite similar to past efforts, but they will be less likely
to be innovative when working within the closed paradigm.
 random paradigm:
 structures a team loosely and depends on individual initiative of the team members.
 When innovation or technological breakthrough is required, team following the random paradigm will excel.
 But such teams may struggle when “Orderly Performance” is required.
 open paradigm:
 attempts to structure a team in a manner that achieves some of the controls associated with the closed
paradigm but also much of the innovation that occurs when using the random paradigm.
 Work is performed collaboratively. Heavy communication and consensus-based decision making are the
trademarks of open paradigm teams.
 Open paradigm team structure are well suited to the solution of complex problems but may not perform as
efficiently as other teams.
 synchronous paradigm:
 relies on the natural compartmentalization of a problem and organizes team members to work on pieces of
the problem with little active communication among themselves.

“Working with people is difficult but not impossible.” Peter Drucker

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 One of the earliest S/W structures was a closed paradigm structure originally called chief
programmer team. The nucleus of the teams is composed of:

 A Senior Engineer that plans, coordinates, and reviews all technical activities of the
team.
 A Technical Staff (2 – 5 people), that conduct analysis and development activities.
 A Backup Engineer that supports the senior engineer in his activities and can replace
the Senior Engineer with minimum loss of project continuity.

 A jelled team is a group of people so strongly know that the whole is greater than the sum
of parts.
 Members of jelled teams are significantly more productive and more motivated than
average.
 They share a common goal, a common culture, and in many cases, a “sense of eliteness”
that makes them unique.
 But not all teams jell. In fact, many teams suffer from “team toxicity.”

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4. Agile Teams

 Team members must have trust in one another.

 The distribution of skills must be appropriate to the problem.
 Mavericks may have to be excluded from the team, if team cohesiveness is to be
maintained.
 Team is “self-organizing”
 An adaptive team structure

 Uses elements of random, open, and synchronous paradigms

 Significant autonomy

 The agile philosophy stresses individual competency coupled with group collaboration as
critical success factors for the team.

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5.Team Coordination & Communication

 Formal, impersonal approaches include software engineering documents and

work products (including source code), technical memos, project milestones,
schedules, and project control tools, change requests and related
documentation, error tracking reports, and repository data.
 Formal, interpersonal procedures focus on quality assurance activities applied to
software engineering work products. These include status review meetings and
design and code inspections.
 Informal, interpersonal procedures include group meetings for information
dissemination and problem solving and “collocation of requirements and
development staff.”
 Electronic communication encompasses electronic mail, electronic bulletin
boards, and by extension, video-based conferencing systems.
 Interpersonal networking includes informal discussions with team members and
those outside the project who may have experience or insight that can assist
team members.

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