Management Spectrum in Software Project Management

This post describes what is project management spectrum and what is the 4 P’s of the software project planning area on which the project management focuses.

4 P’s of Management Spectrum

People

Every Software project involves 5 players which are as follows:

Senior Managers:

These are the one’s who define the business issues and have a significant influence on the project.

Project Managers:

These are the ones who plan, motivate, organize and control the practitioners who do the software work. A project manager should also have the following important characteristics:

• Problem Solving: He should be able to diagnose the technical and organizational issues arising during project execution.
• Managerial Abilities: A good project manager mjust have all the important management skills.
  • Planning, organizing, staffing, directing, controlling, co-ordinating etc. He must take charge of the project.
  • Influence and team building.

Engineers/Practitioners:

These are the ones who deliver the technical skills which are necessary to engineer a product or an application.

Customers:

These are the ones who specify the requirement for the software project.

End Users:

These are the ones who interact with the software product.

Product

Before a product can be planned, its objectives and scope should be established, alternate solutions (if any) should also be considered and the technical and management constraints should be identified. Without this information it is impossible to define reasonable estimates of cost, time and manpower, risk project breakdown takes or schedules etc.

Process

A software process provides the framework from which the comprehensive plan for software development can be established.

Project

In order to successfully manage a software project, we must understand what can go wrong and how to do it right. There are some indicators that imply poor management of the projects.

Poor Management of The Project

• The development team have a poor understanding of the customers needs.
• Vision and Scope is not well defined.
• Changes or modifications are not dealt with well.
• Technology upgradations are not taken seriously.
• Business needs change.
• Deadlines are unrealistic.
• Lack of skills among the development team members.