CS 310 Ch5: Project management

1
CS 310 Ch5 Project management

• What do you think is involved?
• Proposal writing
• Project costing
• Project planning and scheduling
• Project monitoring and reviews
• Personnel selection and evaluation
• Report writing and presentations
• Why is this hard?
• Why is it fun?

2
4.2 Project planning

• Probably the most time-consuming project
  management activity
• One rarely gets it right at first
• Why?
• Things change, plans must be revised

3
Project plan structure

• Introduction
• Project organization
• Risk analysis
• Hardware and software resource requirements
• Work breakdown
• Project schedule
• Monitoring and reporting mechanisms
• How does this compare to your 402 proposal?
• Other types of plan quality, maintenance,
  validation, training, risk analysis,
  configuration management, testing

4
4.3 Project scheduling
Split project into tasks and estimate time and
resources required to complete each task
5
Project scheduling

• Tasks should produce tangible outputs for
  management to judge progress
• Milestones often the end-point of an activity
• Deliverables project results delivered to
  customers
• E.g. software design
• task design
• milestone present design to customer
• deliverable design document

6
Activity network
7
Activity timeline (GANTT chart)
8
Staff allocation
9
Microsoft Project

• For scheduling and tracking a project
• We have a site license, you may put it on your
  computers
• Files have .mpp extension
• Given tasks, durations, predecessors, it creates
  the Gantt chart
• Try it
• What would tasks and milestones be for MPS 402
  proposal?

10
Scheduling problems

• Estimating the difficulty of problems and, hence,
  the cost is hard
• Productivity is not proportional to the number of
  people
• Adding people to a late project makes it later
  (why?)
• The unexpected always happens
• Reliance on project manager intuition and
  experience
• Any others?

11
4.4 Risk management
A risk the possibility an adverse event will
occur E.g. a piece of hardware may be delivered
late
Assess probability and seriousness of
each risk
Technology risks People risks
Organizational risks Requirements risks
Estimation risks
Avoidance strategies Minimization
strategies Contingency plans
What happened? What will you do?