Why Software Project Management is Unique?

Software project is unlike other engineering projects you deal with a product which is intangible and the product is uniquely flexible. For examples, take an example of a project of building bridge where you can see the end product being built. You need to build the bridge according to the plan, and according to the quality standards. Any deviations for said standards or plan you can monitor and can take necessary corrective actions. You can not change the specification of the bridge when ever you need. It has to under go lots of approval processes. Now consider a software product where you can not see product being build until the system is released for testing. Also software engineers have grater control over changes of the product. Even you can deliver end product with required functionalities without considering quality factors.Even we learnt software process models; we cannot find standardized process models being used so that monitoring of product development is not standardized and difficult to manage. Many software products are ‘one-off’ projects which are completed once product is developed or system is implemented in an organization.

Main Project Management activities

Proposal Writing
Writing proposals are essential in order to bid a project or to communicate your project to your management or to your client. The software project proposal will have some technical portion in your proposal and it is recommended that project manager communicate with relevant technical personnel to get the technical part of your proposal correct before you send the proposal to others.(The software project proposal will have some technical portion and it is recommended that project manager to communicate with relevant technical personnel to get the technical part of your proposal correct before you send the proposal to others.)

Project Planning and Scheduling
As project managers this is the important activity in overall project. You need to spend more time on this activity. In the project planning you need to prepare several plans such as quality plan; validation plan, staff development plan and maintenance plan are some of them.You will brake project into more manageable activities and assign resource with expected date to complete a task. For example, let’s take a project of developing a Library system for your university. You need to break the project into smaller activities like, data gathering, designing the database, designing user interfaces, etc and assign your project member for each activity. Then you must have some skill to estimate the time required to complete each task. Having identified each task you will schedule your project activities to develop library system.

Project Costing
Costing is one of your constrain that a project manager need to deal with. So basically you are given a budget and you need to control the cost of the project. In order to do so, you need to have a basic idea of how costing can be done and based on what parameters. You will learn costing techniques later in this course. However you need to estimate time taken to complete each task and what resource you need to accomplish each task and the cost for each task.(However you need to estimate time, resources and cost taken to complete each task.)

Project Monitoring and Reviews
Once you prepare schedule and assign tasks to each person, you need to monitor the progress of each activity. Whether activities are completed as expected, is there any risk area which would hit to the time, cost or quality of end product etc you need to review. How you can monitor software project. This is the unique feature of software projects as you can not see the product being built. You need to trust the people’s feedback of each software engineer regarding the task progress. As project manager you need to deal the situation and manage. Need to find out to way to see actual progress of the work. So once you assign work, communicate what deliverable is expected with which documents.What quality standards you need to follow should be communicated with task assignment and than you can review the status of each task.

Personnel Selection and Evaluation
Software projects are really depending on people and their creativity. Every project manager likes to get experience people for their project. So how you can select such people? You need to have a good skill in selecting suitable people for your project. Once personnel are selected you need to see their progress of work and evaluate them to reward for the work they perform. But project managers will not have freedom to select expert people and reward them the way they want. Why? Project managers need to work within the given budget and reality is that project managers will not be able to get experts due to unavailability of experts and due to budget constrains.

Report Writing and Presentations
As project manager, you are answerable for the success or failure of the project. One of your main responsibility is to update the project status to your project owner, project sponsor and other key stakeholders of the project. So you need to write periodic project status reports and make presentation to key stakeholder to present the status of the project.