Hoofdstuk 2 - Project Management

Question 1

Name the various activities covered by project management. Which one do you consider the most important? Why?

Answer 1

◦ Planning, monitoring, organization, staffing and directing.
◦ All are very important but I think planning is the most important one. If you plan everything thoroughly, and take in mind possible set backs, calculate some risks here and there, then the “hard work” is 80% done. You still need to monitor that everything goes accordingly but if you have a good plan, then there is not much to monitor. The same goes for organization, staffing and directing. Staffing can be thought of whilst planning, and directing is just making sure the team follows the plan.

Question 2

How can you ensure traceability between the plan and the requirements/system?

Answer 2

Naming conventions,…

Question 3

Compare PERT-charts with Gantt charts for project planning and monitoring.

Answer 3

Gantt:
:) time management:
shows taks in timeliness
optimise resources by managing “slack time”
monitor critical tasks
:) resource & staff allocation
shows resource/staff occupation
optimize “free time”
moitor bottle necks
:( task interdependencies
PERT:
:) task interdependencies
shows tasks with estimated timeliness
link tasks that depend on each other
optimize task parallelism
monitor complex dependencies
:) critical path analysis
calculate for each task: ESD, LED
optimize resource allocation to critical path
monitor critical path
:( time management

Question 4

How can you deal with Unknown Unknowns during project planning?

Answer 4

The best thing we can do is being aware and spot opportunities + doing a thorough risk analysis.

Question 5

Choose between managing a project that is expected to deliver soon but with a large risk for delays, or managing a project with the same result delivered late but with almost no risk for delays. Can you argue your choice?

Answer 5

◦ Most of the managers would go with the second option, as would also be my first guess. One of the software engineering definitions of the first lecture mentioned that this is about delivering on time and within budget. I think we can agree that to hold up this definition we would not take giant risks and say late delivering date.
◦ Also, I work in retail. I sell furniture on demand, so we have to custom order everything. Here we also say a date a little later than expected because it is much more pleasant to make a phone call to a customer saying his furniture has arrived already, rather than saying it hasn’t arrived yet.

Question 6

Describe how earned-value analysis can help you for project monitoring.

Answer 6

If we work with the Milestone concept it is easy to monitor the project because the earned value depends on how many milestones we got to finish.

It allows you to compare time spent against the time planned, you can also ask people if delay is expected.

Question 7

Would you consider bending slip lines as a good sign or a bad sign? Why?

Answer 7

Bending slip lines indicate bad planning, it would be a bad sign for the manager.

If it bends positive it is a good sign to the customer (early delivery), if not, it would be a bad sign to the customer.

Question 8

You’re a project leader and one of your best team members announces that she is pregnant. You’re going to your boss, asking for a replacement and for an extension of the project deadline. How would you argue the latter request?

Answer 8

She will slow down (motivation drop)
Replacement will need to catch up: communication overhead + negative productivity

Question 9

You have to manage a project team of 5 persons for building a C++ compiler. Which team structure and member roles would you choose? Why?

Question 10

Can you give some advantages and disadvantages of scrum component teams and scrum feature teams.

Answer 10

◦ A component team takes multiple scrum teams who are each responsible for a single component
▪ Later everything has to fit together so multiple conventions should be made. A bunch of documentation should be written and sometimes there are dependencies between components that we weren’t even aware of when dividing the components.
▪ They work with the same backlog
◦ A feature team takes also multiple scrum teams but they are each responsible for a single feature.