Software Project Management : Introduction

No other industry has such a degree of failure in its projects as the IT industry. No wonder, really: Designing databases is more of an art than a craft, and the same goes for developing software.

Our industry is very much based on individual skills, and as such, results are often unpredictable. That's why it is said that 50% of all IT projects are failures...

The IT industry is very project oriented; we are presented specific tasks to solve, and when they are done, we move on to the next task, or software project.

So, software project management is crucial in order to manage, control and disclose early signs of project failure, so they can be corrected, and the project brought back on the right course again.

Several skills are involved in project management, and this section of the website intends to give you a short, head-on, introduction to the subject via a set of easy-to-read keynotes.

Even if your profession is a database designer, analyst, DBA, software engineer, or other, you will be participating in software projects, and it will be very useful for you to have an insight into software project management.

• This is a basic intro to Managing Software Projects. It gives you some of the basics on project management, as well as it introduces you to some concept fundamentals.
• I have often wondered how managers of earlier generations, before Henry Gantt was born, managed their men, material and money and saw their projects through. Gantt Charts are a great way of knowing, at any point in time, where the project is heading.
• While a Gantt chart provides us with activities and resources such as time, people and materil, Pert Charts provides a network model of your project, which can be used to find the "Critical Path".
• The Work Breakdown Structure, or WBS, as it is affectionately called in PM circles, has been developed as a logical extension of the Gantt chart tool, based on making each task into a deliverable, further decomposed.
• Agile Project Management methods and practices strive to break the major bottleneck of customer / stakeholder response - when the project slides off the assembly line into their hands.
• How does the project manager keep in touch with what is going on with the project in each of the units? So many things are going on, and simultaneously too, that are invisible to them. It is to handle such situations that Multidimensional Project Management as a paradigm got evolved.
• Collaborative Project Management: A project’s inputs and outputs are not the only important entities; the “process” by which it is carried out is important, too. The revolution of Internet have brought in its wake low-cost development teams that are seated in different locations on different continents and different time-zones, using web based project management software.
• In order to impress our bosses, we forget to perfom Project Time Tracking; we tend to project the sunny-side of our personality; this often leads us to delude ourselves that "everything is going on schedule". The result is that the project assumes the status of "behind-schedule" from day one.
• A project manager is first and foremost a people manager. We will not use the term "manipulating stakeholders" here (though the line is very thin); we shall focus on "managing stakeholders" for the sake of Project Management Success.
• Several trillions of dollars have been pumped into handling and managing projects "the professional way" in order to avoid Project Management Failure. Yet, at the end of the day, there is not much to report by way of success.

This concludes this section on Software Project Management.

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