Project Management: approach and techniques

1
Project Management approach and techniques

• Systems Failures theory and practice

2
Problems common in IT projects

• Lack of clarity over objectives
• Lack of involvement from project sponsors
• Tendency for requirements to change during the
  project
• Over-optimistic estimation of time - may lead to
  important activities being overlooked or rushed
  e.g. training.

3
Common issues with IT projects

• Communication, Co-ordination and Commitment
• Tendency for slippage to be magnified through the
  project
• Difficulty of identifying and managing risk the
  central concern of formal project management

4
Project Management as a discipline

• Approach in IT largely derived from Civil
  Engineering
• Focus on estimating likely costs and timescales
  and monitoring progress
• Tends to address failures to meet objectives and
  sometimes failures arising from unanticipated
  outcomes.

5
Project management involves

• Crudely - a framework of Plan-Do-Review
• Planning can use formal analysis technique, e.g.
  Critical Path Analysis
• Allows the identification of activities where
  slippage will affect the whole project i.e. aids
  risk analysis
• Allows monitoring of the project during the Do
  phase

6
PRINCE as an example of a common project
management approach

• Recommended members of project team and groups of
  testers (includes users - investigate system
  environment in planning)
• Recommended documentation e.g. Project
  Initiation Document, Acceptance Letters
• Approach to quality requires users to be part of
  the QA process for individual stages and for the
  whole project

7
Capability Maturity Model

• Trys to assess the capability of an organisation
  to produce software
• Developed by Carnegie-Mellon and US Defence
  Department
• Advocates a continuous learning approach to
  project management
• Organisations go through stages

8
CMM stages

• Initial
• Repeatable
• Defined
• Managed
• Optimised

9
CMM

• Models for
• People
• Software
• Software acquisition
• Integrated product development

10
Review - the forgotten waif

• Post-implementation review essential to any
  organisation that is to learn from project
  successes and failures
• But how to evaluate information systems?
• Cost-Benefit analysis?
• More qualitative analysis of comparing initial
  objectives, outcomes and use of the the
  application?