CHAPTER 5: SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT

PROFESSIONAL ISSUES IN SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

System development is a profession and belongs to the engineering discipline that

employs scientific methods in solving problems and providing solutions to the
society.

Profession is an employment (not mechanical), that require some degree of learning ,

a calling, habitual employment is a collective body of persons engaged in any
profession

There are a number of tasks carried out in an engineering organization and are
classified into their function: -
a) Production : activities that directly contribute to creating products and
services the organization sells
b) Quality management: activities necessary to ensure the quality of
products/ services maintained at this agreed level
c) Research and development: ways of creating/ improving products and
production process
d) Sales and Marketing: selling products/ services and involves activities
such as advertising, transporting, distribution etc

The main professional task in system development is on management of the tasks,

with an aim of producing system that meet users needs, on time and within budget.

Therefore main concerns of the management are: -

 Planning
 Progress monitoring
 Quality control

N.B:
****Learn more about the three main activities during software quality management
NAMELY:

 Quality Assurance
 Quality Control
 Quality Management

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MANAGING SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT PROJECT

Effective system project management focuses on 4P’s i.e.

 People : recruiting, selection, performance management, training,
compensation, career development, organization and work design and
team/ culture development
 Product : product objective and scope should be established first,
alternative solutions considered, parameters established etc. defining the
product , therefore it is possible to estimate cost, effectiveness and project
breakdown to manageable schedules
 Process : frame work activities from which a comprehensive plan for
system development can be established
 Number of framework activities, made up of i.e. tasks, milestone,
work products and the project team adapts quality assurance points.
 Umbrella activities such as quality assurance, system configuration
management and measurement lays the process model
 Project : is planned and controlled system (project) undertaking to achieve
a goal/ attain a solution

PEOPLE
“System are not developed by individuals but teams”.
Players in system development: -
 Senior Managers: define business issues that have significant influence on the
project
 Project (technical) Manager: plan, motivate,, organize and control practitioners
who do the development work
 Practitioners : deliver the technical skill necessary to engineer a product
 Customers : specify the requirement for the system to be engineered
 End-users : interact with the released system/ product

SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT TEAM LEADERS

They should be
 Motivative: encourage team members
 Organizational : able to mould existing processes (or invent new) that
will enable the initial concept be translated to final product
 Innovative : able to generate new/ creative ideas/ solution
 Achiever : able to optimize productivity of team members
 Problem solver : able to diagnose technical and organizational issues that
are relevant and develop a solution
 Controller/ authoritative : able to take charge of the project therefore
confident to control
 Understanding and flexible : able to understand others point of view,
understand others reactions/ signals and change position flexibility, and
remain in control during high- stress situation.

The team should be motivated: -

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  Provided a conducive working environment
 Properly rewarded
 Issued with properly drafted and interpreted specification and tasks
 Should be secured

PRODUCT
Major challenge to the system development manager is quantitative estimates and
organized plan. Production in view of scattered requirements and unavailability of
solid information and fluid (changing) requirements
Therefore examine the product and problem to be solved

First management activity will determine system scope by looking at: -

a) Context : How does it fit into a large system, product, or business context
b) Information objectives : what are its inputs and output requirements
c) Function and performance : what functions does it perform in order to
transform input into output

Problem decomposition / problem partitioning / problem elaboration.

PRODUCT
Generic phases that characterize system development process are; definition,
development and support. Appropriate engineering model must be employed: -
a) Linear sequential (traditional/ waterfall) model
b) Prototyping
c) RAD model
d) Spiral model
e) Incremental model

PROJECT PLANNING
Manages are responsible for
a) Writing project proposal
b) Writing project costing
c) Project planning and scheduling
d) Project monitoring and reviewing
e) Personnel selection and evaluation
f) Report writing and presentations

Project planning is concerned with identifying the activities, milestone and

deliverable produced by a project.
- a plan must be drawn to guide the
development towards the project goals
- system project estimation is activity
concerned with estimating the resources
required to accomplish the project plan

Project manager must anticipate problems which might arise and prepare tentative
solutions to the problem
- plan is used as the driver for the project

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 - plan (initial one) is not static but must be
modified on the project progress as mere
information becomes available

TYPES OF PLAN
a) Quality plan : describes quality procedures and standards that will be used in a
project
b) Validation plan : describes the approach, resources and schedule used for system
validation
c) Configuration management plan : describes the configuration management
procedures and structure to be used
d) Maintenance plan : predicts the maintenance requirements of the system,
maintenance cost and effort required
e) Staff development plan : describes how the skills and experience of the project
team members will be developed.

The planning process starts with an assessment of the constraints (required delivery
date, overall budget, staff available etc) affecting the project

This is carried out in conjunction with an estimation of project parameters such as

structure, size and distribution of functions

The program milestone and deliverables are then defined

A schedule (for the project) is drawn, analyzed and passed and subjected to later
reviews

PROJECT PLAN
Sets out: -
 Resources available to the project
 The work breakdown
 Schedule for carrying out the work

Project plan structure (for the development process): -

 Introduction: describes the objectives of the project and the constraints
(budget, time etc) affecting the project management.
 Project organization : describe the organization of development team,
people involved and their roles in the team
 Risk analysis: describes possible project risks and the likely hood of their
occurrences and risk reduction strategies are proposed .
 Hardware and software resources requirements
 Work breakdown: describes the breakdown of the project into activities
and identifies milestone and deliverable for each activity
 Project schedule: describes the dependencies between activities, the
estimated time required for each milestone and allocation of people to
activities
 Monitoring and reporting mechanisms: describes the management
reports to be produced, where and the monitoring mechanisms used.

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PROJECT SCHEDULING

Estimation of time and resources required to complete activities and organization then
in a coherent sequence.

Involves separating the work (project) into separate activities and judging the time
required to complete these activities, some of which are carried out in parallel

Schedules must: -
 Properly co-ordinate the parallel activities properly
 Avoid situation where whole project is delayed for a critical task to
be finished

Schedules must have allowances (error allowances) that can cause delays in
completion therefore flexible

They must also estimate resources needed to complete each task (human effort,
hardware, software, finance (budget) etc)

NB: key estimation is to estimate as if nothing will go wrong, then increase the
estimate to cover anticipated problems. Also add a further contingency factor to cover
the problems.

Project schedule is usually presented as a set of charts showing

 Work breakdown
 Activity dependency
 Staff allocation

Such charts include: -

 Activity bar charts (3:5)
 Activity network chart
 Gantt charts (staff allocation Vs time chart) (fy 3.8)

PROJECT ESTIMATION
System (software) cost and effort estimate can never be exact, too many variables,
human, technical, environmental, political can affect system cost and efforts applied
to development

Project estimation strive to achieve a reliable cost and effort estimation

A number of options arise trying to achieve this: -

a) Delay estimation until late in the project (estimates done after the project)
b) Base estimates on similar projects that have already been completed
c) Use relating simple decomposition technique to generate project cost and
effort estimates

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