Project Management: Key Concepts and Techniques

Project management is the process of applying knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements.

People — The most important element of a successful project.
Product — The software to be built.
Process — The set of framework activities and software engineering tasks to get the job done.
Project — All work required to make the product a reality.

Senior Managers: Define the business issues that often have significant influence on the project.
Project (Technical) Managers: Plan, motivate, organize, and control the practitioners who do software work.
Practitioners: Deliver the technical skills that are necessary to engineer a product or application.
Customers: Specify the requirements for the software to be engineered.
Stakeholders: Have a peripheral interest in the outcome.
End-users: Interact with the software once it is released for production use.

Motivation: The ability to encourage technical people to produce to their best ability.
Organization: The ability to mold existing processes (or invent new ones) to enable the initial concept to be translated into a final product.
Ideas or Innovation: The ability to encourage people to create and feel creative even when they must work within established bounds.

Democratic Decentralized (DD): No permanent leader; task coordinators are appointed for short durations. Decisions are made by group consensus. Communication is horizontal.
Controlled Decentralized (CD): Has a defined leader and secondary leaders. Problem-solving is a group activity, but implementation is partitioned. Communication is horizontal and vertical.
Controlled Centralized (CC): Top-level problem-solving and internal team coordination are managed by a team leader. Communication is vertical.

CPM (Critical Path Method): Developed by DuPont & Remington Rand.
PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique): Developed for industrial projects where activity times are generally known.

Project planning involves proper estimation of time, schedule, work, and resources.

When: The need for software has been established; stakeholders are on-board; coding is ready to begin.
What: Project planning spans five major activities: estimation, scheduling, risk analysis, quality management planning, and change management planning.
Who: Software project managers, with information from stakeholders and engineers.
Objectives: Create a framework that will help in the estimation of cost, time, and schedule. Define best-case and worst-case scenarios to bound project outcomes.

Establish project scope.
Determine feasibility.
Analyze risks.
Define required resources:
- Human resources needed.
- Software resources.
- Environmental resources.
Estimate cost and effort:
- Decompose the problem.
- Use estimation techniques.
Develop a project schedule.

Can we build software to meet this scope? Is the project technically feasible? Consider financial feasibility, time, and resources.