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Project Management: People and Technology Summary
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Extensive summary of the Project Mngt: People & Technology Course at UvT. 2 Guest lectures missing (RaboBank & KPMG)
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Project ManagementWeek 1 – Appetizer: Project management
A project is a temporary endeavor to create a unique product, service or result.
A project differs from a process. A project is temporary, has a clear start point and end-point. A project has a limited
budget: resources or people are only temporarily allocated to a project. By contrast, a business process is a ‘standing
operation’ with a stable budget and stable roles.
Software project management is concerned with activities to ensure that software is delivered on time, within budget and
in accordance with the scope or requirements of the organization that needs the software. Iron
triangle / devil’s triangle
Quality of the project is sometimes included in the project and sometimes it needs to be
considered. Software projects are hard to manage and in this course we want to study the
following question:
How do we keep software projects under control?
Focus of the course is both on people and technology: combines talking about teams/collaborating and tools/techniques to
making sure these groups work together.
Introduction
2 assignments: pass/fail with 1 other person
Term paper for 30%: with groups of 4
Closed-book exam on campus, unless you opt-out: you can do it online.
o Make sure to read the articles and summarize them a bit!
Guest lectures are the most important!!! 1 - 2 questions based on case-studies on the
lectures.
Developing software is hard… only 29% of all projects in 2015 were successful
(Standish Group Chaos Report).
There are some common success factors: present in all successful projects and
absent in all unsuccessful projects.
Executive sponsorship: leadership
Emotional maturity
User involvement: collection of basic behaviors of how people work together. They study how people really work
together before starting the project (try to change that).
Optimization: structured means of improving business effectiveness.
Agile process: agile team and the product owner are skilled in the agile process.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to
value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Why Agile now?
Agile practices “include scrum, which emphasizes creative and adaptive teamwork in solving complex problems; lean
development, which focuses on the continual elimination of waste; and Kanban, which concentrates on reducing lead
times and work in process.
Now agile methodologies are spreading across a broad range of industries and functions and even into the C-suite.
But executives know little about Agile, so… “with the best of intentions, erode the benefits that agile innovation can deliver”.
Companies need not just new products and services but also innovation in functional processes […]. Companies that
create an environment in which agile flourishes find that teams can churn out innovations faster in both those categories.
TERM PAPER QUESTIONS:
Q1: Why does Agile work when it does?
Q2: Under what circumstances does Agile work? Wrong environments would not work. Military is difficult for software
development.
Or… is it only a fashion?
The management field is susceptible to fashions (Abrahamson 1991).
“Based on five case studies, this research seeks to apply the concepts from management fashion theory to understand how
organizations mindfully (or mindlessly) adopt agile methods.” (Cram and Newell 2016).
Agile has (or can have) all the potential characteristics of a fashion:
1) Norm of progress
2) Norm of rationality
3) Socio-psychological forces [employee needs]
4) Techno-economic forces [org. needs]
5) Innovation devolution [Table]
Three categories:
Crusaders: exclusively adopt agile in a pure form;
Tailors: integrate agile and traditional to fit specific circumstances
Dabblers: ceremonial agile activities along traditional approach.
Project Management: People and Technology
1
,Technology:
The course is about information technology development projects
The course is about tools and techniques to support projects
o Computer science and engineering
People:
Projects are set-up, executed and managed by teams of people.
Agile takes communication and collaboration seriously
o Psychology, political science, sociology
And also … budget, scheduling
o Business administration, economics
Course Objectives
Explain how to successfully initiate, monitor and manage an IT project. In particular,
Explain why managing IT projects remains a challenge for most organizations,
Define what a project is and describe its attributes,
Describe the impact IT projects have on an organization.
Identify the different roles and interests of project stakeholders,
Identify the main principles of both traditional and Agile project management methods and use them to analyze a
case description.
Skills
Participants can make a project planning, a requirements specification and a business case, for a case
description.
Participants can conduct a small research project in groups of four, and report about the outcomes before a given
deadline.
Attitude
Participants are aware of the multi-disciplinary nature of project management. They appreciate the economic,
social and technical aspects involved in information technology development projects, and are able to identify the
appropriate methods to handle these aspects.
Overview
1. Introduction
2. System development
3. Business case and metrics
4. Agile and DevOps
5. Various guest lectures
a. Poonacha Medappa (TiSEM): Open Source
b. Marjolein van Beusekom, Sadheer Ghaghos (KPMG): Quality assurance
c. Daniele Besselse, Marc Wagner (Rabobank): Agile Journey
6. Stakeholders and Support
7. Conclusions and exams preparation
Nature of Information Technology Projects (why they are in particular harder than other types of projects)
Why is Developing IT for Government hard? (they are over-limiting their budgets)
Elias Committee (2014)
1. National government is not “in control” regarding ICT projects
2. Politicians do not realize, but ICT is everywhere
3. National government does not fulfill her ICT policy objectives
4. The accountability and decision-making structure are deficient (ICT chamber)
5. Government has insufficient insight in costs and benefits of ICT
6. ICT knowledge of the national government is lacking
7. ICT project management is weak (because of lack in expertise)
8. ICT bid-for-tender procedures contain perverse incentives
9. Management of contracts in ICT-projects is not professional
10. National government lacks the necessary learning ability
Needs to install a new ICT-center for new expertise.
Three most important things (in red) government is lacking in terms of principal; it is ordering
software but it doesn’t know what it is ordering!
Design Cycle Method
Cycle: iterative
Learn from mistakes: go back and forth in feedback!
Rethink; improve
Four activities:
1. Analyze
2. Design
3. Implement
4. Test
Each affects one another.
Waterfall Method
Sort of an enemy model, hardly any organization uses this, full original
scale. 4 main steps:
2
, analysis, design, implement, test (put one after the other). One output of a phase runs into another phase like a waterfall. Why is
this nice? It is clear to draw a line (when it ends and begins with a deadline: one can easily see when the deadline is overrun).
After testing it goes to the company that wants the software (adoption), then the maintenance and usage stage comes (updating
of bugs/errors etc.). Another reason why this is a clear picture for managers is that it is easy to make milestones. To show what
the results is of each step. Model has clear boundaries and deliverables!
The waterfall is what a programmer does, the SDLC is what the project manager
does when they show it to end-users, and train them and do conversion from old
to new system.
Iterative, Incremental Development (BOEHM, 1988)
See the various phases of a project (Inception, Elaboration, Construction,
Transition). You can see which things are more important in which phases. For
example, Business Modeling, is important to do in the Inception phase and
Elaboration E1 (thicker part). Testing is important towards the end of EACH Phase
(goes up and down). Deployment has a focus on the end.
Funny thing is that this is often conceived as a…
Spiral Model (1988)
Iterative: timebox periods (first cycle: is not going to take more than 6
months means that you have to do the most important things first). Stop it from being timeless is to timebox it.
Risk management: drives decision making
Various cycles: learn and improve
Importance of validation and testing (in the middle of the circle we find the initial idea/concept and every time you go through the
circle you do risk analysis to find out if it still makes sense to continue).
Risk is very important in this spiral model; it is driving the decision-making in whether to continue or not.
Old model lot of developments are now called Agile (also iterative); main difference these cycles are several months and in
Agile they are much shorter.
So now back to Agile
Starting point: use social mechanisms to improve software quality (reviews; discussions).
In particular, work with the ‘business’ in multi-disciplinary teams (product owner). This provides early feedback and support from
users and sponsors. The social skills of the product owner are crucial.
Agile principles (manifesto):
1. Satisfy customer (build something people will use and embrace change)
2. Welcome change in requirements
3. Deliver frequently (small parts of software frequently)
4. Business and developers work together
5. Facilitate motivated people to do their jobs (by delivering frequent software parts)
6. Face-to-face communication (frequently and fast communication)
7. Working software is the measure of progress (if managers want to see if you are on track, do not look at docs)
8. Attention to technical excellence
9. Simplicity (a way of tackling complexity)
10. Self-organizing teams
11. Teams evaluate, learn and adjust
Scrum
Split a project into brief manageable ‘sprints’ (2-4 weeks)
Then utilize teams better (only THIS project) after the 2-4 weeks they go
back to study or whatever
Development/testing involved potentially shippable product increment
(end-product, improved from the previous product and potentially shippable
is because it is tested)
Handle changes in requirements (most important claim), why is this
possible: these things that you do in each sprint comes from a larger pool of things that needs to be done (product
backlog). These things are ordered by priority: most important things have to be done. Things you have not done within the
sprint too bad. If things change, then these blocks get added first (so they are done earlier than the old requirements).
Once in a while you need to re-evaluate the priorities in the product backlog.
3
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