The introduction or overview of a project must only include a list of definitions and acronyms.

The Value of Project Management

Project management has become a formal discipline and a widely practiced part of today's corporate life. While it isn't necessary for you to become an official “project manager” [PM] and get certified by the Project Management Institute [PMI], it's useful for you to know some of the important principles of project management to help you in your role as a manager. Every manager has some PM responsibilities, regardless of how those needs are defined; it can be critical to your success to not only accept, but embrace these responsibilities. Take control of the projects in your business life and manage them properly—it will be well worth your effort.

Abstract

Project Management discusses project management and control. The client’s accountant will use discounted cash flow to value a project. This puts pressure on the project manager to deliver useful software as early as possible.

In addition, if a project involves risk, its expected value is reduced, and it may be uncertain whether the project will have a positive present value. Therefore a preliminary technical feasibility study is sometimes needed to reduce such uncertainty.

Using critical path analysis as a tool, the project manager must find a development structure that allows the regular delivery of products to the client while suiting the capabilities and motivations of their implementors — concerning which it discusses achievement motivation and management by objectives.

The chapter culminates by describing how the various tools discussed in earlier chapters can be put together as a successful methodology for system development.

Publisher Summary

This chapter elucidates the concept and process of project management. It opens with an overview of the concept of engaging stakeholders in research. Stakeholder engagement throughout a project is integral to success. The more a stakeholder participates in the research, including observing as many sessions in as many countries as possible, the greater the potential support for, and acceptance of, the study's findings. Following this, the chapter explains the process of planning for international studies. With a global user research project, there are many factors that must be managed to ensure that the study and output are consistent, reliable, and valid. The planning activities involved when conducting global projects are described. Furthermore, this chapter takes a look at the issue of finding quality in-country resources. Some considerations include ensuring the presence of stakeholders or customers on-site if the project is particularly complex and if the report has to be produced quickly. Finally, this chapter explains the characteristics of a user research team undertaking international projects. It also describes how to manage the relationship between the lead team and the local team. It is important to understand these concepts because the success of the project mainly depends on the interaction between these teams.

3.5 Project management

Project management is an important support process. Indeed, it is necessary to manage the planning, costs and resources. The respect for the schedule may result in impacts on the software application’s safety in the same way as the management of resources, especially human resources.

Figure 3.3 shows the relationship between the production process, quality process and project management. Quality assurance must monitor the other two processes in order to ensure that the company’s quality objectives are being met by the project. Project management aims to manage the resources available for the software application’s realization process.

Project management

Project management is where most organizations fail to achieve their intended objectives. They may identify appropriate goals, but they do not create the necessary structure to reach that new level of service due to unintended and paralyzing barriers or due to a failure of authorities to adequately address competing interests. The correct implementation of a project management process leads to some level of success regardless of barriers, and over time creates a more powerful learning organization.

Once the project plan has been developed, and the assignment of project responsibilities has been designated, it is time to create either hierarchical reporting lines or onetime project management support plans. Some on-going services or operations are logical candidates for either short-term project management reviews or more extensive service quality reviews. The programmatic identification of resources, best practices, evaluation benchmarks, and feedback processes will facilitate an orderly and successful service rollout or review.

PMI’s Project Management Maturity Model

PMI distinguishes between operations management [ongoing] and project management [done in a limited timeframe]. They describe a body of knowledge about project management [PMBOK] and an Organizational Project Management Maturity Model [OPM3] that organizations can use to [1] evaluate their current sophistication in managing projects and then use as [2] a methodology for introducing more sophisticated project management skills. In their PMBOK and in the OPM3 they assume that there are five management processes that every project manager must learn. They include [1] initiating, [2] planning, [3] executing, [4] monitoring and controlling, and [5] closing. Figure 6.11 suggests how the skills involved in each of these processes map to our general overview of management.

Our general model of management [Figure 6.6] pictures an operational management role and describes the activities that a process manager must perform. Project management extends that by adding a process for defining the nature of the specific project to be managed [initiating] and another that critiques the project and pulls together things that were learned in the course of the project [closing].

18.2.5 Use of Project Management Tools to Manage the Development Process

Project management tools support planning and control of the overall development process to ensure effective cost, schedule, and technical performance. These tools may also include workflow engines to control the development process with linkage to development artifacts.

Project management tools, like document & view generation tools, verification & validation tools, and configuration management tools, need to access and understand information across the entire spectrum of tools used in the system development environment. Effective program and technical management of a complex model based project may require identification and evaluation of metrics from all models and tools, and an unambiguous understanding of the current version of each element in those models.

Introduction—How This Applies

Project Management: the art and science of herding cats. While that may not be the formal definition, if that is your role, it will feel that way at some point. This role is similar to that of Security Facilitator, with the difference being one of degrees. A Security Facilitator will generally be responsible for monitoring a few [3–5] people, while a Project Manager has responsibility for projects that could potentially include hundreds of people. In those cases where a project spans such a large number of people, there will frequently be multiple tiers of project management, rolling up to a top-level manager.

These large-scale projects span large numbers of disciplines and will invariably impact the organization, either positively or negatively. Because of the scope and impact, these people may report to C-level executives within the organization. They also will have more authority to draw in resources from within the organization.

Project Management

Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to manage activities in order to meet project requirements. The Project Management Institute, or PMI [www.pmi.org], has developed a highly respected certification process for project management professionals [PMPs] that suggests that any project is accomplished through five stages or processes:

Initiating

Planning

Executing

Monitoring and controlling

Closing

Initiating, the first step in the project management process, includes all the steps and work necessary to create a project charter. A project charter is a document that provides the high-level details about the project, including project title and description; the assigned project manager and his or her authority level; the project’s goals and objectives; and the business case benefits. Also included are the names of senior management involved in decision making and the appropriate signatures for approval. Obviously, nothing should move forward without a written agreement signed by both parties, detailing a clear understanding of the project’s goals and costs. In the PMI world, that document is called a project charter; out in the real world it might have different names and come in different forms, but the need for a signature of approval remains the same.

The initiating phase [see Figure 10.1] may also include a conceptual design, to be able to evaluate high-level costs, assumptions, and constraints, but it is primarily about authorizing the project or phase.

PMO

A relatively new concept in the management of projects, the project management office, or PMO, is typically a formal structure that supports project management within an organization. The PMO provides the policies, methodologies, and templates for managing internal projects or provides support and guidance to others in the organization on how to manage their projects. The PMO can also provide project managers for different projects, relinquishing responsibility for the result of the project to the PMO.

The related steps may include the actual selection of the project or phase. This is when to determine the output of the project goals and objectives, the high-level deliverables, and time and cost estimates to fulfill the business need. The initiating phase also includes creating a narrative description of the project and the responsibilities of the project manager and high-level resources.

During the planning process, you create the scope statement and scope management plan, determine the project team, and develop the work breakdown structure [WBS]. The WBS is a very important part of any project, but it is even more so for DVS. There are many intricacies with DVS design and implementation that are not typical for most other electrical, mechanical, or even network implementations, so the more detailed the task list in the WBS, the better.

We will use the WBS to create the project plan. The project plan is a comprehensive definition of the project detailed through tasks, resources, and time. A Microsoft Gantt project chart is not a project plan; it is just a Gantt chart and only part of the project plan. The project plan includes, but is not limited to, the following information:

Project charter

Major milestones

Scope statement

Resource management plan

WBS

Bill of materials

Change control plan/system

Flowchart diagram

Management plan [PM plans]

Budget and cost management plan

Procurement plan and procurement management plan

Schedule and schedule management plan

Quality management plan

Risks

Communications management plan

Responsibility chart

Performance measurement baselines

The planning process includes finalization of the team and a resource management plan. Human resources are not dependable—they might be pulled from one job and placed in another—so it is important to develop a plan to determine how you will work with changes to people’s schedules or positions.

Creating a WBS dictionary includes putting together all acronyms, names, and terminology into one place to solidify communications. A good example of why this is important is that in wireless networking, a radio can also be a node, a station, a portal, an AP, a mesh node, a mesh bridge, a wireless bridge, or a router, depending on where and what equipment was historically used by the resources and suppliers. A wireless portal can also be an entry point, backhaul, or master, depending on the manufacturer. They all mean the same thing individually but can have different meanings to each other.

17.2.7 Interface with Project Management Tool

Project management can leverage information from the system model to assist in planning and control. The model-based metrics described in Chapter 2 are examples of metrics that can be extracted from the model to assess design quality and design progress and to estimate the level of effort required. The following additional data can easily be provided from the system model:

Number of model elements created or updated within a specific time period

Number of requirements linked by satisfied or verified relationship within a time period

Number of use cases realized

Number of activities allocated to blocks

Number of analysis results [value properties] identified versus number updated

And so on

These metrics can be automatically reported from the model, typically by using the scripting capability of a given tool, providing concrete information to assist in managing the development effort.

As shown in Figure 17.8, the Program Management Tool can be used to establish metrics in the form of SysML constraints, and the System Modeling Tool can then evaluate those expressions and provide model status back to the Program Management Tool in the form of computed value properties from the model.