The Management spectrum

Effective software project management

focuses on the four P’s:
1) The People
2) The Product
3) The Process
4) The Project
 The People
• The “people factor” is so important that the
Software Engineering institute has
developed a people management
capability maturity model (PM-CMM).
• If people factor is strong software
organization can easily undertake
increasingly comprehensive complex
applications.
 The People
• The people involved in a S/W Project includes
1. Senior managers who defines the business issues
that often have significant influence on the project.
2. Project (technical) managers who must plan,
motivate, organize and control the practitioners who do
software work.
3. Practitioners who deliver the technical skills that are
necessary to engineer a product or application
4. Customers who specify the requirements for the S/W
to be engineered
5. End-users who interact with the S/W once it is
released for production use
 The Product
• Before a project can be planned, product objectives should be
established, alternative solutions should be considered, and technical
and management constraints should be identified.
• Without this information, it is impossible to identify cost, risk, project
schedule.
• The s/W Developer and customer must meet to define product
objectives and scope.
• Objectives identifies the overall goals for the product (from the
customers’ s point of view) without considering how these goals are
achieved.
• Scope identifies the primary data, functions and behaviors and
bounding these characteristics in a quantitative manner.
• Once the product objectives and scope are understood, alternative
solutions are considered.
• The alternatives enable managers and practitioners to select a best
approach which suits to the delivery deadlines, budgetary restrictions,
personnel availability, technical interfaces and other factors
•
 The Process
• A particular method of doing something is
generally involving number of steps or
operations.
• The process that deals with the technical and
management issues of S/W development is
called as S/W Process
• A S/W Process provides a framework from
which a comprehensive plan for S/W
development can be estalished
• Framework activities are populated with tasks,
milestones, work products, and quality
assurance points.
 The Project
• Software projects are planned to manage
complexity.
• In 1998, industry data indicated that 26%
of S/w projects failed & 46% experienced
cost and schedule overruns.
• In order to avoid project failure, a S/w
project manager and the S/w engineers
who build the product must plan, monitor
and control the project well.