Chapter 2

Chapter-2
An overview of Project Planning
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Chapter Objectives:
 Determining what the project’s purpose is
 Handling the various organizational entities
 Studying the project’s feasibility
 Determining which plan works best
 Recognizing problems in your software project
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• Projects, big and small, have to be initiated.
• All initiation really means is that everyone
acknowledges that the project has a purpose:
-> to solve a problem,
-> to grasp an opportunity,
-> or to meet demand for a new piece of software.
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Software projects, all software projects, have
one thing in common: They attempt to
provide something for someone else,
whether it’s the organization or the
customer.
The goal, from a project manager’s
perspective, is to solve the problem to satisfy
the demand.
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Identifying the Project Purpose:
Successful projects, and, by default, successful project managers, have to
start by ironing out a few details. Make sure these questions are asked and
successfully answered:
 Why is the project being initiated?
Does everyone agree on this purpose and goals?
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Talking to the stakeholders:
When a project is being initiated, you want to capture as much information
as possible about the project goals. Without a clear picture of what the
project is to capture, it’s going to be challenging to plan and prepare for
your software project.
Here are five questions every project manager should ask stakeholders:
> What are the factors for completion?
> What is the goal of this project?
> What are the areas of the organization that this project will affect?
> What is the project priority?
> What is the accepted range of variance?
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Check out Figure 1. This fancy-schmancy triangle is a model of how most
organizations operate. Each level of your organization has different needs,
different concerns, and different goals for your project. You need to
address each level of your organization to get the project moving to
completion.
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Discussing high-level stuff with the executives:
• Executives are responsible for setting the vision and direction of their
organization.
• This small group of people (or sometimes even a single person) has a
vision for the organization and is interested in taking herself and her
employees there.
• Usually, The executives want to know why any project is occurring
because they want to confirm that the project aligns with their vision.
• If your project doesn’t align with the company’s vision, kill it before
someone else does.
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Discussing high-level stuff with the executives:
Questions you need to ask executives, assuming you’ll be interacting with
this crowd:
 What are the factors for project success?
 What’s your vision for the project result?
 What’s more important, time or budget?
 What risks do you anticipate for this project’s success?
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Playing nice with functional management:
 In the middle of the pyramid are all the folks who comprise functional
management.
 You may know this layer as middle management.
 Their purpose is to carry out the vision of the executives. It’s at this level
of the organization that tactics, strategy, and delivery of purpose to the
employees take place.
 The functional managers must support the vision the executives have in
the
decisions they make.
 At this layer of the model, the functional managers need to understand
the what of project management. The what centers on what the project
will accomplish.
 What areas of the organization will the project affect? What will the
project schedule be? What will the project cost? 10
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Playing nice with functional management:
Questions you’ll need to ask functional managers:
 What are the factors for project success?

 Are there scheduling issues that will affect the project’s end date?
 What resources are available for the software creation?
 What departments and customers will need to interact?
 How will the project team be assembled?
 Do you have a preset budget in mind for the project?
 What risks do you see for this project?
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Having a chat with operations:
 Down deep in the pyramid you’ll find operations.
 These are the people that do the work.
 They answer the question, “How is this going to get done?”
 The people in operations focus on the day-to-day activities of getting
things done.
 When it comes to project management, these employees are concerned
with the activities that support the layers of the triangle above them.
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Having a chat with operations:
Questions you’ll need to ask folks in operations:
 What are the factors for project success?
 How will the software be used?
 What other software projects are you working on now?
 What immediate risks do you see in the project?
 Who has the experience to get this done?
 Do we need training to create this software?
 What areas of the project are you dreading?
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Reaching project consensus:
There are several approaches to accomplishing this goal:
 Conduct interviews
 Do root cause analysis
 Do business analysis
 Walk a mile in the stakeholders’ shoes
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Dealing with Politics:
As you know, every organization is different, but there are some rules that
can help you keep the focus on the project and away from politics and
personalities. Follow these do’s and don’ts:
 Don’t feed the fire
 If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all
 Do stand up
 Do protect your reputation
 Don’t micromanage
 Do play fair
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Project Changing States (2.3):
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Initiating the project:
The first process group is initiation. When a project is initiated,
it is being considered; it hasn’t been officially launched.
Projects get initiated to fulfill many different needs, some of
which we’re sure you’ve experienced, and most of which can
be addressed with software:
 A problem needs to be solved.
 An opportunity needs to be captured.
 A profit needs to be made.
 An existing environment needs to be improved.
 A process needs to be speeded up and/or made more
efficient.
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Initiating the project:
After you identify the need that the software project is
engineered to answer, you need to deal with some mechanics
of project management:
Conducting a feasibility study
Determining the project deliverable
Creating the project charter
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A project charter accomplishes the following:
 It identifies the project manager in writing.
 It identifies the project sponsor in writing.
 It authorizes the project manager to spend organizational
resources on the project.
 It describes the product. That’s right; the description you
worked so
hard to create goes in the project charter.
 It specifically identifies the business need that the project
was undertaken to address. If you have a business case, you
can pull information from there.
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Planning the project:
• The second process group, the planning process, determines
how the project will move forward after the project
feasibility, description, and charter are complete.
• The planning process group gets the project rolling in a big
way.
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Examining project planning approaches:
You can follow one of these formal project management planning methodologies:
 Rolling wave planning
 Scrum
 Extreme programming
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Executing the project:
In this process group, you’re also tackling some other key activities:
 Beginning your procurement activities, if needed
 Working with your organization’s quality assurance programs
 Communicating project information to appropriate stakeholders
 Managing project risk assessments
 Developing the project team
 Managing conflicts among the team and among stakeholders
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Controlling the project:
Controlling is all about ensuring the project is done according to plan. You control
stuff — quality, scope, budgets, the schedule, risks —and you get to monitor
performance.
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Closing the project:
The fifth process group, closing, for good project managers, involves lots of
activities, including the following:
 Tying up loose financial ends

 Unveiling the product to the customer for final acceptance
 Finalizing the project documentation
 Moving on
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Living with Stakeholders:
 A project stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in the
outcome of your project.
 Everyone involved in the project, from the creators to its eventual users
and even your organization’s customers, is a stakeholder.
 Some of these stakeholders are more crucial than others, and you’re
generally only concerned with key stakeholders.
 Key stakeholders are the stakeholders who have an immediate influence
over your project success:
• The project manager
• The project sponsor
• The project team
• Functional managers
• Subject matter experts (SMEs) who help you make decisions
• Anyone who can directly influence decisions about the project
• Customers who pay for the project expenses
• End users 25
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Completing a Project Feasibility Study:
 A project feasibility study (often just called a feasibility study)
determines
whether a project is feasible with the constraints tied to the project. For
example, you might ask, “Can you create the desired software in four
months, with two developers, and a proposed budget of $58,000?”
 A feasibility study looks at constraints, including the exact details of the
product scope, and allows you to explore each of the issues and make a
judgment.
 At the very least, a feasibility study enables you to present the facts to
managers so that they can determine what’s feasible.
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What feasibility studies do (and don’t do):
Some reasons to consider conducting a feasibility study are that these
studies:
 Can save time and money
 Can give you and the stakeholders an opportunity to do a risk
assessment
A feasibility study does not:
• Serve as a research paper
• Cheerlead the project manager’s point of view
• Present alternate ideas
• Campaign for additional time or funds
• Offer advice on the project’s initiation
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Finding a feasibility consultant:
Regardless of your approach to finding an SME, a good consultant will have
the following characteristics:
 Experience
 Effective communication
 Willingness to participate
 Willingness to adhere to a contractual agreement and timeline
 Ability to provide useful information on an ongoing basis
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Understanding How Executives Select Projects:
Projects may get selected in one of two ways:
 Constrained optimization
 Benefit comparison methods
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Using the benefit comparison selection model:
 The most common approach to selecting projects is the benefit
comparison selection model.
 This basically means you use a predefined approach to selecting
projects and choose the project, or projects, that have the best
attributes.
 So, if you propose a project with lots of benefits, but your archrival,
Paully, proposes a project that also boasts lots of benefits, management
examines which project, yours or Paully’s, has the most to offer.
 Managers compare projects and choose the best one for your
organization.
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Using a scoring model:
• A scoring model establishes a foundation of desired attributes such as
profitability, cost, timeline, return on investment (see the section,
“Finding a project’s ROI”), required staffing, and so on.
• Each attribute is assigned a value. As each proposed project is reviewed,
the attributes of the project are assigned scores.
• The projects with the highest scores are chosen for launch. In Table 2-1,
each project (in the first column) is scored based on its attractiveness in
various areas. Then the final scores are tallied (in the last column).
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Using a scoring model:(Table 2.1)
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Finding a project’s ROI:
 Every organization, for-profit or otherwise, should be concerned with

the
return on investment (ROI) of a project.
 In particular, project managers, and sometimes project selection
committees, are concerned with how valuable the project will be in
dollars and cents.
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Finding the present value:
The present value is a formula that determines how much a future amount
of dollars is worth today. Imagine a project manager that boasts his project
deliverables will be worth $275,000 in five years. But what’s $275,000
today?
Here’s what the formula looks like:
I is the interest rate and n is the number of time periods for the project.
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Finding the net present value:
The NPV finds the present value for each time period over the planned
release of the software to determine the true total value of the
deliverable’s worth. Here’s how it works:
1. Complete the present value for each release of the software.
2. Find the sum of each release’s present value.
3. Subtract the organization’s original investment from the sum of
present value.
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Finding the Future value:
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Writing the Product Description:
The product description captures the essence of what the project will
create. It describes the deliverables, the function of the deliverables, and
how the product will affect the organization.
Every product scope should include the following:
 Overall function of the software
 Features of the software the project will create or revise
 Purpose of the project work
 Any optional or desired components that may be incorporated into the
 product based on the project manager’s discretion
 Metrics for product acceptance (speed, reliability, and consistency, for
 example)
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Writing the Product Description:
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Building a dream team:
 Forming
 Storming
 Norming
 Performing
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Chapter 2

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Chapter-2

An overview of Project Planning

 What are the factors for project success?

 Tying up loose financial ends

 Every organization, for-profit or otherwise, should be concerned with

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