Chapter 4

Question 1

What do you understand by project organizational structure?

Answer 1

It is a chart that visualizes the organizational structure of a project.

Question 2

What do you understand by Operational structure of a project?

Answer 2

It describes the way project members interact with each other.

Question 3

What is the role of steering committee for a project and what issues do they address?

Answer 3

The role of the steering committee is to supervise a project and within the committee, questions about budget, project objectives, time, and quality are discussed. Members of this committee are the project’s stakeholders.

The project manager reports to the steering committee.

Question 4

Highlight the different roles in a typical traditional software engineering project?

Answer 4

1. Technical architect: The responsibility of the technical architect is to get the system to work properly from technical point of view. A particular aspect of this are the non-functional requirements such as performance, efficiency, stability, or availability of the system.

Synonyms for this role are: chief architect, chief programmer, technical designer, technical project leader

2. Business architect: The responsibility of a business architect is to ensure that the system to be built meets the functional requirements. Business architects are business matter experts and counterparts of technical architects.
   They are tightly involved in requirements analysis, system specifications and functional testing. The result of their work is the system’s business architecture . Synonym == chief architect.
3. Quality Assurer: The responsibility of the quality assurer is to assure that the project meets the quality criteria of the customer. Synonym == Quality manager
4. Project office: It is an office set up for administrative tasks such as accounting, organization of meetings etc in a large projects.
5. Project leader: Their basic responsibility is to manage the project on the inside. They set up a project plan and performs project controlling. They perform team meetings and are the contact person for the team members.
6. Project Manager: They represent the project to the outside. They do contract negotiations and are part of the project’s steering committee.

Question 5

What are the benefits of splitting large teams into sub teams?

Answer 5

1. It helps to reduce the workload of team leading
2. You can reduce project complexity by building sub-teams.

Note: Your team structure should correspond to the work breakdown structure.

Question 6

Describe the Phase-oriented / role oriented structure

Answer 6

Steering committee
- project manager
- project stakeholders
⬇️
Project leader
Quality assurer-Ken ↔️ Project office - Zubi

Business subjects Technical subjects Testing
Team leader - Tom Team leader - Sam Team leader - AJ

   ⬇️ - Business architect : Kachi                              ⬇️ Technical architect - JP                 ⬇️
 Other team members                                           Other team members              Team members 

The project is supervised by the steering committee. The project leader is been assisted by the quality assurer and the project office which makes up the main team. The main team is subdivided into three, the business subjects team - works on business related engineering tasks like requirements analysis and system specifications , technical subjects team - completes system design and does the implementation and testing team - starts working after the business team to set up test cases and once the system is developed, the test team checks them.

Question 7

Describe the product-oriented organization structure of a project

Answer 7

Steering committee
- project manager
- other stakeholders
⬇️
Project leader
Quality assurance ↔️ Project office

                                  Technical architect       ↔️                Business architect 

Sales application Batch application Admin application
Team leader Team leader Team leader

• other team members - other team members - other team members

Here the team is split into three parts according to the application to be built and all three teams go through all software engineering phases. They are staffed with both business experts as well as technical staff. The business and technical architects supervise all three teams to achieve consistent architecture of the whole system.

Question 8

Compare phase-oriented structure to product-oriented structure

Answer 8

Phase-oriented structure makes it easy to staff specialists for your project while for product-oriented structure, you need generalists who can work on any task in software engineering process. It is much easier to find people for phase-oriented team.

Question 9

Things to consider if you’re using phase-oriented structure

Answer 9

• When staffing specialists you have to find a way to handle idle time. For example, business matter experts are needed at the beginning and end of a project, during implementation there are usually idle.
• In phase-oriented team, you have to ensure continuity and consistency.
  E.g Most business matter experts who have written the specifications will leave the project after the early phases, a lot of knowledge not written down will be lost with them.

Question 10

What is the difference between project organisation and line organisation or business organisation?

Answer 10

The business organisation or line organisation is a permanent organisation in contrast to project organisation which is a temporary.

A project is staffed with employees who already have a certain place in the line organisation.

Question 11

Outline three ways to align the project organisation and line organisation

Answer 11

1. Integrate the project into the line organisation: This is the simplest way to integrate a project with a line organisation; for the duration of the project, a temporary department is founded. It is costly because it results in re-organisation of the company. Employees give up their former jobs to start working on a new job within the project. It is typically used for large projects because of the high cost of this organisation.
2. Staff-influenced organisation : The project leader is the coordinator of all team members, all employees remain in their line positions while the project leader tries to influence them to work on the project tasks. This organisation is quite inexpensive however responsibilities are very unclear in this project structure. It can be used for low priority projects with low project risks.
3. Matrix organisation: It is the mixture of the two alternatives, projects as part of line organisation and staff-influenced organisation . The cost for this kind of organisation is moderate and responsibilities and competencies are clear.

Note: From project-oriented point of view, project organisation as part of the line organisation is the best alternative because responsibilities and competencies are clearly structured along the project organisation.