Lecture 2 Project Management Basics

Question 1

Project Definition

Answer 1

• A project is an undertaking, limited in time, with a clear goal and a specific budget, requiring a concerted effort
• A project consists of
  
  • A start date and duration
  • A set of deliverables to a client
  • A schedule
  • All technical and managerial activities required to produce and deliver the deliverables
  • Resources consumed by the activities
• A project is managed by a project manager
  
  • Administers the resources
  • Maintains accountability
  • Makes sure the project goals are met.

Question 2

What is a role?

Answer 2

A role defines a set of responsibilities

A responsibility is a duty or task a person is required to do Examples of roles and responsibilities:

• Project manager
  
  • Administer the resources
  • Maintain accountability
  • Make sure the project goals are met
• Analyst
  
  • Analyse the application domain
  • Create a taxonomy of the domain abstractions
• System architect
  
  • Decompose the system into subsystems • Choose a software architectural style
  • Select the system integration strategy
• Tester
  
  • Design and implement tests.

Question 3

Example of Meeting Management Roles

Answer 3

• Primary facilitator
  
  • Organize the meeting and guide the execution
  • Set up the agenda, describing objective and scope • Distributed the agenda to the meeting participants
• Minute taker
  
  • Record the meeting
  • Identify action items and issues
  • Distributed the minutes to the participants and other stakeholders
• Time keeper
  
  • Keep track of time.

Question 4

Role Taxonomy: Role types

Answer 4

Question 5

Assignments of Roles to Participants

Answer 5

• One-to-One: Ideal but rare
• Many-to-Few
  
  • Each project member assumes several “hats”
  • Danger of over-commitment
• Many-to-“Too-Many”
  
  • Some people don’t have significant roles
  • Lack of accountability
  • Loosing touch with project
• Problems in Role Assignments:
  
  • Incompetence: The wrong person fills the wrong role
  • Useless role: The role exists only to minimize damage control
  • Increase of Bureaucracy: The role swells unnecessarily simply because it can.

Question 6

Bad Role Assignments

Answer 6

• Bad role assignments have been expressed in 3 timeless laws:
• Incompetence -> Peter Principle
  
  • “Employees who perform their roles in a hierarchy with competence are promoted to a higher level until they reach a level where they are no longer competent. There they remain forever”
• Useless Role -> Dilbert’s Law
  
  • “Companies tend to systematically promote their least- competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing”
• Increased Bureaucracy-> Parkinson’s Law
  
  • „Work expands to fill the time available for its completion“ Parkinson says this happens for two reasons:
    
    • “Officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals”
    • ”Officials make work for each other”

Question 7

Refactored Solution Heuristics. How to deal with bad role assignment

Answer 7

• Dealing with incompetence:
  
  • It makes little sense to take your most brilliant engineer and have him or her manage people and budgets
• Dealing with useless roles:
  
  • Put individuals to work in their core competencies.
• Dealing with increased bureaucracy: •
  
  • Improve estimation
  • Don’t wait for the last minute.

Question 8

What is a task?

Answer 8

• A task describes the smallest amount of work monitored (tracked) by the project manager
  
  • Typically 3-10 working days effort (1-2 weeks)
• Tasks are associated with a
  
  • Role
  • Work Package
  • Work Product
  • Start date
  • Duration
  • Required resources.

Question 9

What is an Activity?

Answer 9

• An activity is a major unit of work
• Culminates in a project milestone
  
  • A project milestone is a scheduled event used to visualize/measure progress
  • A project milestone is visible to the customer
  • A project milestone usually produces a baseline
• Activities can also have internal checkpoints
  
  • These are not externally visible to the customer
• Activities allow to separate concerns
• Precedence relations often exist among activities
  
  • Example: “Activity A1 must be finished before Activity A2 can start.”

Question 10

What is a Unit of Work

Answer 10

• Activities are often grouped again into higher-level activities:
  
  • Phase 1, Phase 2, …., Phase n
  • Step 1, Step 2, …., Step n
• Unit of Work: A task or an activity that contains other tasks and lower-level activities

Question 11

Examples of Activities in a Software Project

Answer 11

• • Planning
• • Requirements Elicitation
• • Analysis
• • System Design
• • Rationale Management
• • Configuration Management
• • Detailed Design (Object Design) • Implementation
• • Testing
• • Delivery

Question 12

What is Project Function ?

Answer 12

• Project Function: An activity that spans the entire duration of a software project. Examples of project functions include project management, configuration management, quality assurance, and verification and validation [IEEE 1058]*.

• • Project management
• • Documentation
• • Configuration Management • Testing
• • Continuous Integration
• • Continuous Delivery

Sometimes project functions are also called cross-development processes or Integral processes*

Question 13

What is a Work Package?

Answer 13

• A task or activity is specified by a work package which contains:
  
  • Description of work to be done
  • Preconditions for starting, duration, required resources
  • Work products to be produced, acceptance criteria for it Risks involved
• A work package must have completion criteria
  
  • Includes the acceptance criteria for the work products produced by the task or activity.

Question 14

What is a Work Product?

Answer 14

• A work product is the visible outcome of a unit of work, that is, a task or activity
• Examples
  
  • A model
  • A review of a document
  • A presentation
  • A piece of code
  • A test report
• Work products that have to be given to the customer are called deliverables.

Question 15

Associations between roles, tasks, activities, work products, and work packages

Answer 15

Question 16

What is functional organization?

Answer 16

• In a functional organization people are grouped into departments, each of which addresses an activity (“function”)
• Examples of departments
  
  • In traditional companies: Finance, production, sales, marketing
  • In software companies additionally: Analysis, design, integration, testing, delivery
• Properties of functional organizations
  
  • Projects are pipelined through the departments
    
    • Example: The project starts in research, moves to development, then moves to production
  • Different departments often address identical needs
    
    • Example: Configuration management, IT infrastructure
  • Only few participants are completely involved in a single project.

Question 17

Properties of Functional Organizations

Answer 17

• Advantages:
  
  • Members of a department have a good understanding of the functional area they support
• Disadvantages:
  
  • It is difficult to make major investments in equipment and facilities
  • High chance for overlap or duplication of work among departments.

Question 18

Project based organization

Answer 18

• In a project-based organization people are assigned to a project, each of which has a problem to be solved in a certain time within a given budget
• Key properties of project-based organizations
  
  • Teams are assembled for a project when it is created
  • Each project has a project manager
  • A participant is involved only in a single project
  • Teams are disassembled when the project terminates.

Question 19

Properties of Project-based Organizations

Answer 19

• Advantages
  
  • Very responsive to new requirements (because the project is newly established and can be tailored around the problem)
  • New people can be hired who are familiar with the problem or who have special capabilities
  • There is no idle time for the project members
• Disadvantages
  
  • Teams cannot be assembled rapidly. Often it is difficult to manage the staffing/hiring process
  • Flat staffing vs. gradual staffing
  • Because there are no predefined departments (as in a functional organization), roles and responsibilities need to be defined at the beginning of each project.

Question 20

Flat Staffing vs Gradual Staffing

Answer 20

• Gradual Staffing:
  
  • The organization is gradually ramped up by hiring people as needed
  • Gradual staffing is motivated by saving resources in the early part of the project
• Flat Staffing:
  
  • All the participants are assigned at the start of a project
  • Consulting companies usually allocate these participants from a pool of available people.

Question 21

When to use a Project-based Organization

Answer 21

• Project has high degree of uncertainty
• Open communication is needed among participants
• Requirements are expected to change during the project
• New technology that could effect the outcome may appear during the project.

Question 22

Matrix Organization

Answer 22

In a matrix organization, people from different departments of a functional organization are assigned to work on one or more projects

Project manager and participants are usually assigned to a project with less than 100 % of their time.

Question 23

Properties of Matrix Organizations

Answer 23

• Advantages
  
  • Teams for projects can be assembled rapidly from the departments
  • Expertise can be applied to different projects as needed
  • Consistent reporting and decision procedures can be used for projects of the same type
• Disadvantages
  
  • Team members are often not familiar with each other • Team members have different working styles
  • Team members must get used to each other.

Question 24

Challenges of Matrix Organization

Answer 24

• Team members working on multiple projects have competing demands for their time
• Multiple work procedures and reporting systems are used by different team members
• “Double-boss problem”: Team members must respond to two different bosses with different focus:
  
  • Focus of the manager of the department:
    
    • Assignments to different projects, performance appraisal
  • Focus of the project manager :
    
    • Work assignments to project members, support of the project team, deliver project in time and within budget
• Matrix organization suffer when department and project interests are in conflict with each other.

Question 25

Project Organization Structures

Answer 25

• A project organization defines the structure among the members (participants) of a project in terms of relationships
• A project organization has at least 3 relationships:
  
  • Decision structure
    
    • It models the control flow: Who decides what?
  • Reporting structure:
    
    • Who reports their status to whom?
  • Communication structure
    
    • It models the information flow: Who facilitates communication with whom?
• Org-chart usually visualize these 3 structures in one graph with a single hierarchical relationship
• A good project manager keeps these 3 structures separate.

Question 26

Visualization of Project Organization Structures

Answer 26

• Org-Chart: Most commonly used method to visualize a hierarchical project organization

Question 27

Observations on Project Management Structures

Answer 27

• Information flow in a hierarchical project organization does not work well with unexpected changes
  
  • Manager is not necessarily always right and might even misunderstand communications requests
• Information flow in non-hierarchical project organizations
  
  • Cutting down on bureaucracy
  • Reduces development time
  • Decisions are expected to be made at each level
  • Hard to manage.

Question 28

Hierarchical Structure

Answer 28

• Projects with high degree of certainty, stability, uniformity and repetition
  
  • Requires little communication
  • Role definitions are clear
• When?
  
  • The more people on the project, the more need for a formal structure
  • Customer might insist that the test team be independent from the design team
  • Project manager insists on a previously successful structure.

Question 29

Communication Skills

Answer 29

• A software project manager as well as a software engineer needs to acquire several skills:
  
  • Collaboration
    
    • Negotiate requirements with the client and with members from your team and other teams
  • Presentation
    
    • Present a major part of the system during a review
  • Technical writing
    
    • Write part of the proposal, part of the project documentation
  • Management
    
    • Facilitate a team meeting, find compromises, negotiate between conflicting demands
• In large system development efforts, you will spend more time communicating than coding.

Question 30

Communication Event vs. Mechanism

Answer 30

Communication event: Information exchange with defined objectives and scope

• Scheduled events: Planned communication •
  
  • Examples: Review, meeting
• Unscheduled events: Event-driven communication
  
  • Examples: Request for change, clarification, bug report

Communication mechanism: Tool or procedure that can be used to deal with a communication event

• Synchronous mechanism: Tool requires communication partners to be available at the same time
• Asynchronous: Tool does not require communication partners to communicate at the same time.

Question 31

Communication Events

Answer 31

• Problem Definition: Focus on Scope
  
  • Objective: Present goals, requirements and constraints
  • Example: Client presentation
  • Usually scheduled at the beginning of a project
• Project Review: Focus on system models
  
  • Objective: Assess status and review the system model •
  • Example: Analysis review, system design review
  • Scheduled after each project milestone
• Client Review: Focus on requirements
  
  • Objective: Brief the client, agree on requirements changes
  • Example: Requirements review, prototype review
  • The first client review is usually scheduled after the analysis phase.

Question 32

Communication Mechanisms (Synchronous)

Answer 32

Informal Meeting

• Example: Meeting at the water cooler, hallway meeting
• Supports: Unplanned conversations, request for clarification, request for change
• • Cheap and effective for resolving simple problems – Information loss, misunderstandings are frequent

Formal Meeting

• Example: Face-to-face, telephone conference tool, video
• conference tool
• Supports: Planned conversations, client review, project review, status review, brainstorming, issue resolution
• • Effective for issue resolutions and consensus building – High cost (people, resources).

Question 33

Communication Mechanisms (Asynchronous)

Answer 33

E-Mail

• • Supports: Release, change request, brainstorming
• • Ideal for planned communication and announcements
• – E-mail taken out of context can be misunderstood, sent to the wrong person, or lost

Newsgroups, Forums

• • Supports: Release, change request, brainstorming
• • Suited for discussion among people who share a common interest; cheap (shareware available)
• – Primitive access control (often, you are either in or out)

Wikis

• • Supports: Release, change request, inspections
• • Documents contain links to other documents
• – Does not easily support rapidly evolving documents.

Question 34

Summary

Answer 34

• A project is a scheduled effort towards the achievement of a goal that takes place within a limited time, resources and budget
• Project participants are organized in terms of roles and teams
  
  • An individual can fill more than one role
• Work is organized in terms of activities and tasks assigned to roles to produce work products such as deliverables
• 3 types of project organizations
  
  • Functional, matrix and project-based organization.
• 3 structures to deal with information and control flow in a project: Decision, reporting and communication structure
• Communication Events: Planned and Unplanned (driven by unexpected events)
• There are asynchronous and synchronous communication mechanisms (tools or procedures) to support communication events.

Question 35

What is a project function?

Select one:

a. It is an activity
b. It is a task

Answer 35

a

Question 36

A team leader is a liaison

Select one:

a. true
b. false

Answer 36

b

Question 37

A solution domain expert is a manager

Select one:

a. true
b. false

Answer 37

b

Question 38

An application domain expert is a consultant

Select one:

a. true
b. false

Answer 38

a

Question 39

A configuration manager is a developer

Select one:

a. false
b. true

Answer 39

a

Question 40

Choose the typical relationships in a project organization

Select one or more:

a. Communication structure
b. Reporting structure
c. Configuration Structure
d. Documentation structure
e. Decision structure
f. Delegation structure

Answer 40

a,b, e

Question 41

What are communication mechanisms?

Select one or more:

a. Review
b. Email
c. Bug Report
d. Wiki

Answer 41

b,d