PROCESSES AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

1.1 PROCESSES AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

A software project has two main activity dimensions: engineering and project management. The engineering dimension deals with building the system and focuses on issues such as how to design, test, code, and so on. The project management dimension deals with properly planning and controlling the engineering activities to meet project goals for cost, schedule, and quality.

If a project is small (say, a team of one or two working for a few weeks), it can be executed somewhat informally. The project plan may be an e-mail specifying the delivery date and perhaps a few intermediate milestones. Requirements might be communicated in a note or even verbally, and intermediate work products, such as design documents, might be scribbles on personal note pads.

These informal techniques, however, do not scale up for larger projects in which many people may work for many months the situation for most commercial software projects. In such projects, each engineering task must be done carefully by following well-tried methodologies, and the work products must be properly documented so that others can review them. The tasks in the project must be carefully planned and allocated to project personnel and then tracked as the project executes. In other words, to successfully execute larger projects, formality and rigor along these two dimensions must increase.

Formality requires that well-defined processes be used for performing the various tasks so that the outcome becomes more dependent on the capability of the processes. Formality is further enhanced if quantitative approaches are employed in the processes through the use of suitable metrics.

What is a process? Technically, a process for a task comprises a sequence of steps that should be followed to execute the task. For an organization, however, the processes it recommends for use by its engineers and project managers are much more than a sequence of steps; they encapsulate what the engineers and project managers have learned about successfully executing projects. Through the processes, the benefits of experience are conferred to everyone, including newcomers in the organization. These processes help managers and engineers emulate past successes and avoid the pitfalls that lead to failures.

For a project, the engineering processes generally specify how to perform engineering activities such as requirement specification, design, testing, and so on. The project management processes, on the other hand, specify how to set milestones, organize personnel, manage risks, monitor progress, and so on. This book focuses on the project management process.

When you consider project management processes, you must ask the question whether project managers will use them. I have often heard process designers complain that project managers don't follow the process and that they resist changes. My experience with project managers at Infosys and other organizations is that they actually want to use processes but only if they're reasonable and will help the project managers execute their projects better. Project managers do, however, resent processes that seem to be unnecessarily bureaucratic and add little value to their work. The trick, then, is to have lightweight processes those that help project managers plan and control their projects better and that give them the flexibility to handle various situations.

In response to the question "Why should project managers follow processes?" S.D. Shibulal founder, director, and the current head of customer delivery at Infosys sums it up nicely in a few key points:

         Processes represent collective knowledge. Using them increases your chances of success.

         A process may have some extra steps, but you will not always know beforehand which ones are not needed, and hence you will increase your risks by taking shortcuts.

         Without processes, you cannot predict much about the outcome of your project.

         You and the organization cannot learn effectively without having defined processes. And learning and improvement are imperative in today's knowledge-based world.

         Processes lower your anxiety level. The checklists inevitably cover 80 percent of what needs to be done. Hence, your task reduces to working out the remaining 20 percent.