17.1 Project Management

Project management includes defining, planning, and organizing a given project, as well as defining activities, interfaces, and resources. Project management also consists of, among other things, analyzing risks, estimating, and doing detailed planning of activities, as well as following up on progress and doing relevant updating of the plan.

Project management produces mostly documents. The types of objects that might be placed under configuration management for project management are proposals, contracts, the project plan, development plan, quality assurance plan, test plan, and configuration management plan. The tools employed may also be placed under configuration management, primarily word processors, drawing tools, and planning tools.

Example

A large Danish company that develops instruments with a great deal of software in them places all plans and budgets for products and their attached projects under configuration management. This permits managers to follow the progress of a project closely and gather experience about the development process.

Deliveries

Configuration items produced in connection with project management are rarely deliveries in themselves , as it's not often necessary to place sections, drawings, or diagrams in a plan under configuration management individually. Configuration items for project management should be part of all milestone deliveries in the project's lifetime. These items often change considerably from milestone to milestone, especially if they're produced iteratively, so that for each milestone they contain details for the next development activity and only general guidelines for the following ones.

Connection with Other Processes

As implied in the list of possible configuration items, project management and other processes may overlap, in the sense that these processes may be responsible for placing their own plans under configuration management. For instance, quality management may be responsible for the quality assurance plan. It's important to have well-defined interfaces, so that it's clear where responsibility is placed, which information should be transmitted from one area to another, and which conventions must be agreed upon.

The person responsible for configuration management may also be responsible for producing the configuration management plan and placing it under configuration management. The information that in this case must be transmitted from one area to another may be the total resource expenditure for configuration management, which must be consolidated in the general project plan. Conventions may include the naming of documents, which must be the same no matter whether the document (the plan) is identified by the project manager or the person responsible for configuration management.

Identification

Table 17-1 describes document type designations that are relevant to project management items.

Table 17-1. Project Management Document Types

NNN	Designation
PRO	Proposal
GPP	General project plan
QAP	Quality assurance plan
GTP	General test plan
CMP	Configuration management plan

Tracing

Plans can and should be traced to a contract, so it can be documented that the contractual obligations are being kept. Some configuration items for project management may trace to each otherfor example, a test plan or configuration management plan may trace to the project plan. Otherwise, the same considerations apply to configuration items for project management as to configuration items of the document type generally .

Change Control

For plans, the producer often puts forward an event registration, which may be followed by a single change request for the configuration itemthe plan (or the like) he wants to update. The configuration control board(s) for these items should be composed of representatives for external stakeholders, such as the customer or a marketing department.

Status Reporting

Generally, these configuration items have no great need for status reporting during a project. In large projects with subprojects , however, it may be important to obtain status information for all project documentation. Summarizing reports , with information for process improvement, may also be needed.