Lisa Callahan

QMCS 425

315/98

Project management is a way of organizing the design process within a project. It is a concept that everyone should be familiar with and understand. To maintain accuracy information systems often have rigorous project management techniques. For any systems development project, effective project management is necessary to ensure that the project does not exceed the deadline, is developed within an acceptable budget, and fulfills expectations and specifications.

Project management is the process of defining, planning, directing, monitoring, and controlling the development of an acceptable system at a minimum cost within a specified time frame.

Different organizations take different approaches to project management. Project management is one of the most important organizational tools in most software companies. Almost every service consulting firms provide involves project management.

Clarifications of project management:

• It is a system development methodology that defines a sequence of steps
• Every system development project is unique
• The steps that comprise systems development are complex and need through documentation
• There are several objectives that need to be met within a project before the goal is achieved

• Few projects are completed within budget and on time with out extensive documentation and clarifications of objectives

• Information systems must satisfy the business, user, and management expectations and specifications

• Defining a scope
• Develop a purchase order
• Estimating a budget amount
• Deciding a weekly details
• Delegating a team
• Listing the equipment necessarily
• Selecting a project manager

The project manager is in charge of delegating tasks to the assigned and appropriate individuals. The project goal is established and dated. The next step for the project manager is to set up a feasible schedule for the project that coincides with the purchase order. When estimating the requirements for the project, managers must ask questions such as:

• What is the time elapse on this project and how much time is allotted?
• How many people will be needed?
• How much will the project cost?
• What tasks need to be completed before the project is implemented?

The most important aspect in project management is defining the scope. If project goals are not properly defined than it will never fully satisfy the user. At a minimum, a complete project definition should include the following:

• A brief statement of the problem or opportunity to be accomplished
• The project goal
• The project objectives. Objectives are dated and measurable actions, results, or conditions are directed toward achieving the goal.

• Project assumptions and constraints. These define factors that are unchangeable. Examples, absolute deadline, available resources, current technology, and expected technological advances.

Failure to achieve consensus on defining the scope dooms a project before it starts. It is often the case that written project definition should be a visible element in every project. Then if any of these parameter change, that change would result in a reevaluation of the entire project.

Once a methodology has been developed, it must be implemented. This can be an enormous undertaking. Extensive documentation insures that all angles have been covered and accuracy is at it’s best. As deadlines approach methodology often times becomes scarce. One of the most common causes of project delays is taking shortcuts through or around the methodology and documentation. Various actions result, such as:

• The project gets behind schedule and the team moves in a negative direction
• The project is over budgeted and the team makes up costs by skipping important documentation steps
• The clients wish to have the project done on their own time

Documentation is one of the most important issues concerning project accuracy. The life cycle of a project goes through five basic stages. These include:

• Design
• Develop
• Analyze
• Initial process
• Implementation

The cost of repair in a project increases if errors are found near the implementation stage instead on finding them through extensive documentation in the design stage. Development and documentation should be an on going process throughout the life cycle. For example, at Anderson Consulting they use an extensive project management system. On one project they can spend months and even years just at the design stage. They believe that documentation is an endless task and the more documented a project is the less errors there will be in the future. What if an extensive management system was implemented back in the 1970’s when the dates were developed for two digits instead of four. Maybe in design, analysts would have tested and found out that a problem would occur in the year 2000. Or maybe not.

The Way Project Management Should Be, Business Weekly, April 1997.

The Future in Software, Deah Johnson. (article)

Problems and Implementation, Computer World.

Issues in Design, Microsoft Corporation.