Software Project Management
3 days
Description
The techniques known as “software engineering” are enabling us to win the technical battles for improved software quality. But, as we get the better of our technical problems, so we become all the more painfully aware of another problem — project management. To get the best quality and productivity from the technical people on our project teams we must manage them as well as we possibly can.If you’re looking for ways to deal with seemingly impossible deadlines, if you’re looking for ways to improve the quality of your staff, if you’re looking for ways to improve your own management abilities, or if you’re simply looking for sure-fire project-management techniques drawn from the years of experience of other managers to help you to run your projects, then this workshop is for you. It will give you and the people who work for you a better chance for improved project quality and productivity. And it will enable you all to better serve the true business needs of the company for which you work.
These are the overall areas of software-project and team management that the course addresses:
- How and why projects must fit in with overall corporate objectives
- The relationship between project costs and benefits
- What project management is and what activities it comprises
- Different project-management strategies for different situations
- Quality and productivity — and how to measure them
- Estimating tools
- The truth about time pressures
- Why shop methodologies usually fail
- Worthwhile project reporting techniques
- How to conduct productive project meetings, reviews and walkthroughs
- How to hire the right person for the job
- When it is (and is not) correct to dismiss an employee
- How to develop your staff
- How to build successful teams
- The importance of the work environment
- The concept of the “mediocracy” and how to avoid it
- How to build in yourself the qualities and attitudes of a successful manager
Contents
In this course we will cover:The project charter: Software projects in the service of the company’s business
- Typical lack of technical and business coherence of systems
- Evenness in business application
- Supporting the corporate business strategy
- Understanding the business
- Three viewpoints of the business
- An integrated plan of attack
- Potential problems with this approach — and how to avoid them
Cost-effective projects
- Is the project doomed to fail before it begins?
- Project benefits: problems and opportunities
- Project costs Available resources
- Best combination of costs/benefits/resources
- Itemization
- Ranged estimates
- Risk areas
Departmental organization
- The need for an organization
- The components of an organization
- Staff and line management
Project management
- What is management?
- What is special about project management?
- Concerns of project managers
- The risks of software projects
Components of project management
- Planning
- Organizing
- Integrating
- Measuring
- Revising
Project management strategies
- Ultraconservative or ultra-radical?
- Generalist or specialist?
- What does "agile" really mean for a manager?
- What do "incremental" and "iterative" mean for a manager?
- It's not just agile versus waterfall: The full spectrum of management strategies
Quality
- What is quality?
- Where does quality come from?
- Individual quality profiles
- Software spoilage
- Quality and team productivity
Estimating costs
- The components of cost
- Three reasons for poor cost estimates
- The metrics group
- The law of cost migration
- Measures of productivity
The relationship between effort and time
- The origins of deadlines
- The deadliness of deadlines
- The findings of Putnam/Boehm/DeMarco
- The meaning behind these findings
- Acceleration through superficiality and the knock-on effect
- Acceleration through added resources and the partitioning penalty
- Acceleration through “supercharging” and the stress/productivity curve
- Legitimate deadlines
- Strategies for meeting a legitimate deadline
Methodologies and standards
- The methodology as a generic project plan
- Standardization of tools and techniques
- The benefits of standards
- The traditional failure of standards
- What works?
- A brighter outlook
Project reporting
- Time reporting
- Project-status reporting: Standard traffic-light approach
Respecting reality
- Organizational delusion
- The Wunderwaffe
- Integrating disparate realities
- The upward channel of communication
Project meetings
- Before the meeting
- During the meeting
- Planning, communicating, problem-solving and deciding types of meetings
- After the meeting
Project reviews
- Project-scope
- Analysis
- Implementation-model
- Design
- Programming
- System
- Acceptance
- Periodic-production
- Post-project retrospectives
- Project walkthroughs
Hiring
- Jobs and roles
- “Be-know-do” definitions
- Advertising
- Interviewing
- Selecting
- Integrating
- Contract / consulting help
Developing your staff
- Education and training: whose responsibility?
- Promoting: defeating the Peter Principle
- Motivating: know thy people
Teams
- Team building
- Attributes of effective teams
- Attributes of effective members
- Attributes of effective leaders
- Problem areas
Working in a mediocracy
- What is a mediocracy?
- Five causes of a mediocracy
- What you, in your position, can do about a mediocracy