Sayed Jamaluddin Afghani

University
Faculty of Computer Science
Department of Software
Engineering

Software Project Management (SPM)

People Management

Semester:
Lecture No.: 3rd
Lecturer: Zakirullah Ezam
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Managing People

 The people working in a software organization are its greatest assets. It is

expensive to recruit and retain good people, and it is up to software managers
to ensure that the engineers working on a project are as productive as possible.

 In successful companies and economies, this productivity is achieved when

people are respected by the organization and are assigned responsibilities that
reflect their skills and experience.
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 It is important that software project managers understand the technical issues

that influence the work of software development. Unfortunately, however, good
software engineers are not always good people managers.

 Software engineers often have strong technical skills but may lack the softer
skills that enable them to motivate and lead a project development team.

 As a project manager, you should be aware of the potential problems of people

management and should try to develop people management skills.
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Four Critical Factors

 There are four critical factors that influence the relationship between a manager
and the people that he or she manages:

 Consistency: All the people in a project team should be treated in a

comparable way. No one expects all rewards to be identical, but people should
not feel that their contribution to the organization is undervalued.

 Respect: Different people have different skills, and managers should respect
these differences. All members of the team should be given an opportunity to
make a contribution.
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 Inclusion: People contribute effectively when they feel that others listen to
them and take account of their proposals. It is important to develop a working
environment where all views, even those of the least experienced staff, are
considered.

 Honesty: As a manager, you should always be honest about what is going well
and what is going badly in the team. You should also be honest about your
level of technical knowledge and be willing to defer to staff with more
knowledge when necessary.
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Motivating People

 As a project manager, you need to motivate the people who work with you so
that they will contribute to the best of their abilities.

 In practice, motivation means organizing work and its environment to

encourage people to work as effectively as possible.

 If people are not motivated, they will be less interested in the work they are
doing. They will work slowly, be more likely to make mistakes, and will not
contribute to the broader goals of the team or the organization.
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 To provide this encouragement, you should understand a little about what

motivates people. People are motivated by satisfying their needs. These needs
are arranged in a series of levels as follows:
 The lower levels of this hierarchy represent fundamental needs for food, sleep,
and so on, and the need to feel secure in an environment.
 Social need is concerned with the need to feel part of a social grouping.
 Esteem need represents the need to feel respected by others.
 And self-realization need is concerned with personal development.
 People need to satisfy lower-level needs such as hunger before the more
abstract, higher-level needs
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 Psychological personality type also influences motivation. Bass and Dunteman

identified three classifications for professional workers such as Task-oriented
people, Self-oriented people, and Interaction-oriented people.

 People working in software development organizations are not usually hungry,

thirsty, or physically threatened by their environment.

 Therefore, making sure that peoples’ social, esteem, and self-realization needs
are satisfied is most important from a management point of view.
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Human Needs Hierarchy

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Teamwork

 Most professional software is developed by project teams that range in size

from two to several hundred people.

 However, as it is impossible for everyone in a large group to work together on

a single problem, large teams are usually split into a number of smaller groups.
Each group is responsible for developing a part of the overall system.

 The best size for a software engineering group is 4 to 6 members, and they
should never have more than 12 members. When groups are small,
communication problems are reduced.
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 Putting together a group that has the right balance of technical skills,
experience, and personalities is a critical management task.

 However, successful groups are more than simply a collection of individuals

with the right balance of skills.

 A good group is solid and thinks of itself as a strong, single unit. The people
involved are motivated by the success of the group as well as by their own
personal goals.
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Benefits of Creating a Organized Group

The group can establish its own quality standards:

 Because these standards are established by consensus, they are more likely to
be observed than external standards imposed on the group.

Individuals learn from and support each other:

 Group members learn by working together. Inhibitions caused by ignorance are
minimized as mutual learning is encouraged.
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Knowledge is shared:
 Continuity can be maintained if a group member leaves. Others in the group
can take over critical tasks and ensure that the project is not unduly disrupted.

Refactoring and continual improvement is encouraged:

 Group members work collectively to deliver high-quality results and fix
problems, irrespective of the individuals who originally created the design or
program.
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Factors that Effect on Team Working

The people in the group:

 You need a mix of people in a project group as software development involves
diverse activities such as negotiating with clients, programming, testing, and
documentation.

The way the group is organized:

 A group should be organized so that individuals can contribute to the best of
their abilities and tasks can be completed as expected.

Technical and managerial communications:

 Good communication between group members, and between the software
engineering team and other project stakeholders, is essential.
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Selecting Group Members

 A manager or team leader’s job is to create a cohesive group and organize that
group so that they work together effectively. This task involves selecting a
group with the right balance of technical skills and personalities.

 Sometimes people are hired from outside the organization; more often,
software engineering groups are put together from current employees who have
experience on other projects.

 Managers rarely have a completely free hand in team selection. They often
have to use the people who are available in the company, even if they are not
the ideal people for the job.
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Group Organization

 The way a group is organized affects the group’s decisions, the ways
information is exchanged, and the interactions between the development group
and external project stakeholders.

 Small programming groups are usually organized in an informal way. The

group leader gets involved in the software development with the other group
members. In an informal group, the group as a whole discusses the work to be
carried out, and tasks are allocated according to ability and experience.

 More senior group members may be responsible for the architectural design.
However, detailed design and implementation is the responsibility of the team
member who is allocated to a particular task.
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 In hierarchical groups the group leader is at the top of the hierarchy. He or she
has more formal authority than the group members and so can direct their
work.

 There is a clear organizational structure, and decisions are made toward the top
of the hierarchy and implemented by people lower down.

 Communications are primarily instructions from senior staff; the people at

lower levels of the hierarchy have relatively little communication with the
managers at the upper levels.
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Group Communications

 It is absolutely essential that group members communicate effectively and

efficiently with each other and with other project stakeholders. Group members
must exchange information on the status of their work, the design decisions
that have been made, and changes to previous design decisions.

 They have to resolve problems that arise with other stakeholders and inform
these stakeholders of changes to the system, the group, and delivery plans.

 Good communication also helps strengthen group cohesiveness. Group

members come to understand the motivations, strengths, and weaknesses of
other people in the group.
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 Effective communication is achieved when communications are two-way and

the people involved can discuss issues and information and establish a common
understanding of proposals and problems.

 All this can be done through meetings, although these meetings are often
dominated by powerful personalities. Informal discussions when a manager
meets with the team for coffee are sometimes more effective.

 Communications within a group are influenced by factors such as the status of

group members, the size of the group, the gender composition of the group,
personalities, and available communication channels.