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Software Project
Management
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Topics covered

 Project Management
 Risk management
 Managing people
 Managing Groups
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Project
Management
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Software project management

 Concerned with activities involved in ensuring

that software is delivered on time and on
schedule and in accordance with the
requirements of the organisations developing
and procuring the software.
 Project management is needed because software development
is always subject to budget and schedule constraints that are set
by the organisation developing the software.
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Success criteria

 Deliver the software to the customer at the agreed time.

 Keep overall costs within budget.
 Deliver software that meets the customer’s expectations.
 Maintain a happy and well-functioning development team.
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Software management distinctions

 The product is intangible.

 Software cannot be seen or touched. Software project managers cannot
see progress by simply looking at the artefact that is being constructed.
 Many software projects are 'one-off' projects.
 Large software projects are usually different in some ways from previous
projects. Even managers who have lots of previous experience may find it
difficult to anticipate problems.
 Software processes are variable and organization specific.
 We still cannot reliably predict when a particular software process is likely to
lead to development problems.
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Management activities

 Project planning
 Project managers are responsible for planning. estimating and
scheduling project development and assigning people to tasks.
 Reporting
 Project managers are usually responsible for reporting on the
progress of a project to customers and to the managers of the
company developing the software.
 Risk management
 Project managers assess the risks that may affect a project, monitor
these risks and take action when problems arise.
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Management activities

 People management
 Project managers have to choose people for their team and
establish ways of working that leads to effective team performance
 Proposal writing
 The first stage in a software project may involve writing a proposal to
win a contract to carry out an item of work. The proposal describes
the objectives of the project and how it will be carried out.
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Risk
Management
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Risk management

 Risk management is concerned with identifying risks and drawing

up plans to minimise their effect on a project.
 A risk is a probability that some adverse circumstance will occur
 Project risks affect schedule or resources;
 Product risks affect the quality or performance of the software
being developed;
 Business risks affect the organisation developing or procuring
the software.
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Examples of common project,
product, and business risks
Risk Affects Description
Staff turnover Project Experienced staff will leave the project before it is finished.

Management change Project There will be a change of organizational management with

different priorities.
Hardware unavailability Project Hardware that is essential for the project will not be delivered on
schedule.
Requirements change Project and product There will be a larger number of changes to the requirements
than anticipated.
Specification delays Project and product Specifications of essential interfaces are not available on
schedule.
Size underestimate Project and product The size of the system has been underestimated.

CASE tool underperformance Product CASE tools, which support the project, do not perform as
anticipated.
Technology change Business The underlying technology on which the system is built is
superseded by new technology.
Product competition Business A competitive product is marketed before the system is
completed.
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The risk management process

 Risk identification
 Identify project, product and business risks;
 Risk analysis
 Assess the likelihood and consequences of these risks;
 Risk planning
 Draw up plans to avoid or minimise the effects of the risk;
 Risk monitoring
 Monitor the risks throughout the project;
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The risk management process
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Risk identification

 May be a team activities or based on the individual project manager’s

experience.
 A checklist of common risks may be used to identify risks in a project
 Technology risks.
 People risks.
 Organisational risks.
 Requirements risks.
 Estimation risks.
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Examples of different risk types

Risk type Possible risks

Technology The database used in the system cannot process as many transactions per second as expected. (1)
Reusable software components contain defects that mean they cannot be reused as planned. (2)
People It is impossible to recruit staff with the skills required. (3)
Key staff are ill and unavailable at critical times. (4)
Required training for staff is not available. (5)
Organizational The organization is restructured so that different management are responsible for the project. (6)
Organizational financial problems force reductions in the project budget. (7)
Tools The code generated by software code generation tools is inefficient. (8)
Software tools cannot work together in an integrated way. (9)
Requirements Changes to requirements that require major design rework are proposed. (10)
Customers fail to understand the impact of requirements changes. (11)
Estimation The time required to develop the software is underestimated. (12)
The rate of defect repair is underestimated. (13)
The size of the software is underestimated. (14)
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Risk analysis

 Assess probability and seriousness of each risk.

 Probability may be very low, low, moderate, high or very high.
 Risk consequences might be catastrophic, serious, tolerable or
insignificant.
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Risk types and examples

Risk Probability Effects

Organizational financial problems force reductions in the project budget (7). Low Catastrophic

It is impossible to recruit staff with the skills required for the project (3). High Catastrophic

Key staff are ill at critical times in the project (4). Moderate Serious
Faults in reusable software components have to be repaired before these Moderate Serious
components are reused. (2).
Changes to requirements that require major design rework are proposed (10). Moderate Serious

The organization is restructured so that different management are responsible High Serious
for the project (6).
The database used in the system cannot process as many transactions per Moderate Serious
second as expected (1).
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Risk types and examples

Risk Probability Effects

The time required to develop the software is underestimated (12). High Serious

Software tools cannot be integrated (9). High Tolerable

Customers fail to understand the impact of requirements changes (11). Moderate Tolerable

Required training for staff is not available (5). Moderate Tolerable

The rate of defect repair is underestimated (13). Moderate Tolerable
The size of the software is underestimated (14). High Tolerable
Code generated by code generation tools is inefficient (8). Moderate Insignificant
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Risk planning

 Consider each risk and develop a strategy to manage that risk.

 Avoidance strategies
 The probability that the risk will arise is reduced;
 Minimisation strategies
 The impact of the risk on the project or product will be reduced;
 Contingency plans
 If the risk arises, contingency plans are plans to deal with that risk;
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Strategies to help manage risk

Risk Strategy
Organizational financial Prepare a briefing document for senior management showing how the project is
problems making a very important contribution to the goals of the business and presenting
reasons why cuts to the project budget would not be cost-effective.
Recruitment problems Alert customer to potential difficulties and the possibility of delays; investigate
buying-in components.
Staff illness Reorganize team so that there is more overlap of work and people therefore
understand each other’s jobs.
Defective components Replace potentially defective components with bought-in components of known
reliability.
Requirements changes Derive traceability information to assess requirements change impact; maximize
information hiding in the design.
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Strategies to help manage risk

Risk Strategy
Organizational Prepare a briefing document for senior management showing
restructuring how the project is making a very important contribution to the
goals of the business.
Database performance Investigate the possibility of buying a higher-performance
database.
Underestimated Investigate buying-in components; investigate use of a
development time program generator.
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Risk monitoring

 Assess each identified risks regularly to decide whether or not it is

becoming less or more probable.
 Also assess whether the effects of the risk have changed.
 Each key risk should be discussed at management progress
meetings.
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Risk indicators

Risk type Potential indicators

Technology Late delivery of hardware or support software; many reported
technology problems.
People Poor staff morale; poor relationships amongst team members; high
staff turnover.
Organizational Organizational gossip; lack of action by senior management.
Tools Reluctance by team members to use tools; complaints about CASE
tools; demands for higher-powered workstations.
Requirements Many requirements change requests; customer complaints.
Estimation Failure to meet agreed schedule; failure to clear reported defects.
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Key points

 Good project management is essential if software engineering projects are to be

developed on schedule and within budget.
 Software management is distinct from other engineering management. Software is
intangible. Projects may be novel or innovative with no body of experience to
guide their management. Software processes are not as mature as traditional
engineering processes.
 Risk management is now recognized as one of the most important project
management tasks.
 Risk management involves identifying and assessing project risks to establish the
probability that they will occur and the consequences for the project if that risk
does arise. You should make plans to avoid, manage or deal with likely risks if or
when they arise.
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Managing
People
Managing people

 People are an organisation’s most important assets.

 The tasks of a manager are essentially people-oriented. Unless
there is some understanding of people, management will be
unsuccessful.
 Poor people management is an important contributor to project
failure.
 People management factors

 Consistency
 Team members should all be treated in a comparable way without favourites
or discrimination.
 Respect
 Different team members have different skills and these differences should be
respected.
 Inclusion
 Involve all team members and make sure that people’s views are considered.
 Honesty
 You should always be honest about what is going well and what is going badly
in a project.
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Motivating people

 An important role of a manager is to motivate the people

working on a project.
 Motivation means organizing the work and the working
environment to encourage people to work effectively.
 If people are not motivated, they will not be interested in the
work they are doing. They will work slowly, be more likely to
make mistakes and will not contribute to the broader goals of
the team or the organization.
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Motivating people

 Motivation is a complex issue but it appears that their are

different types of motivation based on:
 Basic needs (e.g. food, sleep, etc.);
 Personal needs (e.g. respect, self-esteem);
 Social needs (e.g. to be accepted as part of a group).
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Human needs hierarchy
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Need satisfaction

In software development groups, basic physiological and safety needs are not an issue.
 Social
 Provide communal facilities;
 Allow informal communications e.g. via social networking
 Esteem
 Recognition of achievements;
 Appropriate rewards.
 Self-realization
 Training - people want to learn more;
 Responsibility.
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Individual motivation

Alice is a software project manager working in a company that develops alarm systems. This company wishes to
enter the growing market of assistive technology to help elderly and disabled people live independently. Alice has
been asked to lead a team of 6 developers than can develop new products based around the company’s alarm
technology.

Alice’s assistive technology project starts well. Good working relationships develop within the team and creative
new ideas are developed. The team decides to develop a peer-to-peer messaging system using digital
televisions linked to the alarm network for communications. However, some months into the project, Alice notices
that Dorothy, a hardware design expert, starts coming into work late, the quality of her work deteriorates and,
increasingly, that she does not appear to be communicating with other members of the team.
Alice talks about the problem informally with other team members to try to find out if Dorothy’s personal
circumstances have changed, and if this might be affecting her work. They don’t know of anything, so Alice
decides to talk with Dorothy to try to understand the problem.
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Individual motivation

After some initial denials that there is a problem, Dorothy admits that she has lost interest in the job. She
expected that she would be able to develop and use her hardware interfacing skills. However, because of the
product direction that has been chosen, she has little opportunity for this. Basically, she is working as a C
programmer with other team members.

Although she admits that the work is challenging, she is concerned that she is not developing her interfacing
skills. She is worried that finding a job that involves hardware interfacing will be difficult after this project.
Because she does not want to upset the team by revealing that she is thinking about the next project, she has
decided that it is best to minimize conversation with them.
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Personality types

 The needs hierarchy is almost certainly an over-simplification of

motivation in practice.
 Motivation should also take into account different personality
types:
 Task-oriented;

 Self-oriented;

 Interaction-oriented.
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Personality types

 Task-oriented.
 The motivation for doing the work is the work itself;
 Self-oriented.
 The work is a means to an end which is the achievement of
individual goals - e.g. to get rich, to play tennis, to travel etc.;
 Interaction-oriented
 The principal motivation is the presence and actions of
co-workers. People go to work because they like to go to
work.
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Motivation balance

 Individual motivations are made up of elements

of each class.
 The balance can change depending on personal
circumstances and external events.
 However, people are not just motivated by personal factors but
also by being part of a group and culture.
 People go to work because they are motivated by the people
that they work with.
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Managing
Groups
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Teamwork

 Most software engineering is a group activity

 The development schedule for most non-trivial software
projects is such that they cannot be completed by one person
working alone.
 A good group is cohesive and has a team spirit. The people
involved are motivated by the success of the group as well as by
their own personal goals.
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Teamwork

 Group interaction is a key determinant of group performance.

 Flexibility in group composition is limited
 Managers must do the best they can with available people.
 Group cohesiveness

In a cohesive group, members consider the group to be more important than any
individual in it.
 The advantages of a cohesive group are:
 Group quality standards can be developed by the group members.
 Team members learn from each other and get to know each other’s work;
Inhibitions caused by ignorance are reduced.
 Knowledge is shared. Continuity can be maintained if a group member
leaves.
 Refactoring and continual improvement is encouraged. Group members
work collectively to deliver high quality results and fix problems, irrespective
of the individuals who originally created the design or program.
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Team spirit

Alice, an experienced project manager, understands the importance of creating a cohesive group. As they are
developing a new product, she takes the opportunity of involving all group members in the product specification
and design by getting them to discuss possible technology with elderly members of their families. She also
encourages them to bring these family members to meet other members of the development group.

Alice also arranges monthly lunches for everyone in the group. These lunches are an opportunity for all team
members to meet informally, talk around issues of concern, and get to know each other. At the lunch, Alice tells
the group what she knows about organizational news, policies, strategies, and so forth. Each team member then
briefly summarizes what they have been doing and the group discusses a general topic, such as new product
ideas from elderly relatives.

Every few months, Alice organizes an ‘away day’ for the group where the team spends two days on ‘technology
updating’. Each team member prepares an update on a relevant technology and presents it to the group. This is
an off-site meeting in a good hotel and plenty of time is scheduled for discussion and social interaction.
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The effectiveness of a team

 The people in the group

 You need a mix of people in a project group as software development
involves diverse activities such as negotiating with clients, programming,
testing and documentation.
 The group organization
 A group should be organized so that individuals can contribute to the best
of their abilities and tasks can be completed as expected.
 Technical and managerial communications
 Good communications between group members, and between the
software engineering team and other project stakeholders, is essential.
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Selecting group members

 A manager or team leader’s job is to create a cohesive group

and organize their group so that they can work together
effectively.
 This involves creating a group with the right balance of technical
skills and personalities, and organizing that group so that the
members work together effectively.
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Assembling a team

 May not be possible to appoint the ideal people to work on a

project
 Project budget may not allow for the use of highly-paid staff;
 Staff with the appropriate experience may not be available;
 An organisation may wish to develop employee skills on a software
project.
 Managers have to work within these constraints especially when
there are shortages of trained staff.
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Group composition

 Group composed of members who share the

same motivation can be problematic
 Task-oriented - everyone wants to do their own thing;
 Self-oriented - everyone wants to be the boss;
 Interaction-oriented - too much chatting, not enough work.
 An effective group has a balance of all types.
 This can be difficult to achieve software engineers are often task-oriented.
 Interaction-oriented people are very important as they can detect and
defuse tensions that arise.
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Group composition

In creating a group for assistive technology development, Alice is aware of the importance of selecting members
with complementary personalities. When interviewing potential group members, she tried to assess whether they
were task-oriented, self-oriented, or interaction-oriented. She felt that she was primarily a self-oriented type
because she considered the project to be a way of getting noticed by senior management and possibly promoted.
She therefore looked for one or perhaps two interaction-oriented personalities, with task-oriented individuals to
complete the team. The final assessment that she arrived at was:

Alice—self-oriented
Brian—task-oriented
Bob—task-oriented
Carol—interaction-oriented
Dorothy—self-oriented
Ed—interaction-oriented
Fred—task-oriented
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Group organization

The way that a group is organized affects the decisions that are
made by that group, the ways that information is exchanged and
the interactions between the development group and external
project stakeholders.
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Group organization

 Key questions include:

 Should the project manager be the technical leader of the group?
 Who will be involved in making critical technical decisions, and how
will these be made?
 How will interactions with external stakeholders and senior company
management be handled?
 How can groups integrate people who are not co-located?
 How can knowledge be shared across the group?
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Group organization

 Small software engineering groups are usually organised

informally without a rigid structure.
 For large projects, there may be a hierarchical structure where
different groups are responsible for different sub-projects.
 Agile development is always based around an informal group on
the principle that formal structure inhibits information exchange
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Informal groups

 The group acts as a whole and comes to a consensus on

decisions affecting the system.
 The group leader serves as the external interface of the group but
does not allocate specific work items.
 Rather, work is discussed by the group as a whole and tasks are
allocated according to ability and experience.
 This approach is successful for groups where all members are
experienced and competent.
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Group communications

 Good communications are essential for effective group working.

 Information must be exchanged on the status of work, design
decisions and changes to previous decisions.
 Good communications also strengthens group cohesion as it
promotes understanding.
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Group communications

 Group size
 The larger the group, the harder it is for people to communicate with other
group members.
 Group structure
 Communication is better in informally structured groups than in
hierarchically structured groups.
 Group composition
 Communication is better when there are different personality types in a
group and when groups are mixed rather than single sex.
 The physical work environment
 Good workplace organisation can help encourage communications.
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Key points

 People are motivated by interaction with other people, the recognition of

management and their peers, and by being given opportunities for personal
development.
 Software development groups should be fairly small and cohesive. The key
factors that influence the effectiveness of a group are the people in that
group, the way that it is organized and the communication between group
members.
 Communications within a group are influenced by factors such as the status of
group members, the size of the group, the gender composition of the group,
personalities and available communication channels.