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Shorter software project delivery time frames and increasingly tighter
resource constraints have combined to put greater pressure on software
application development teams. Although all major software development maturity
models have for years emphasized the use of standardized project management
techniques as a means to improve development productivity, most development
organizations have only superficially instituted the practices and processes
involved with serious project management. This is in part because many academic
aspects of 'textbook' project management are not easily adaptable to the highly
fluid nature of today's dynamic software development life-cycle environments. It
is also partly because these practices and the actual commercial project
management software applications that are available to support the practice of
how a software project.
Over the next three years, the Gartner Group indicates that project
management will become one of the top five major strategic issues that most
software managers will have to address to be successful. It is critical for
those managers currently structuring or renovating their software project
management capability to build a project management culture on a solid
foundation. The first step is to picture a simple mental metaphor involving
three interdependent processes—the three Cs of project
management—Coordination, Communication, and Collaboration.
Coordination
Standard project management techniques serve as the fundamentals of the
Coordination layer. Estimating, planning, scheduling, resource allocation,
budgeting, and earned value analysis are all methods to 'coordinate' the
activities, skills, priorities, risks, and scope of an application development
project. Generally, this layer produces the management- level 'abstractions'
that are the flags of the project management system in the classic sense: A
project schedule (Gantt chart or Critical Path) or timeline (Staged Deliveries,
Milestones), a project Work Breakdown Structure, a project budget, and a project
risk log. Usually these flags are flown at the monthly project or business
reviews; sometimes at half-mast, in the case of a poorly executed project.
Communication
Perhaps the weakest past link of most project management environments has
been the ability of project teams to effectively communicate, whether they are
geographically or cubically dispersed. Web-based technologies combined with
e-mail and other techniques are rapidly eliminating those problems. New focus
has been put on ways to help project teams better communicate across virtual,
geographical, functional, or technological barriers to improve the productivity
with which project issues are identified, discussed, actioned, assigned, and
resolved. This includes the ability for teams to host and participate in on-line
meetings, present and review information electronically, and deliver information
in a more efficient and timely manner.
Collaboration
An accepted definition of project management, taken from the Project
Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), is
"the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project
activities in order to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations from a
project." Any organization wishing to profitably deploy advanced project
management capabilities to enable its project management processes and systems
to operate in a highly collaborative way.
Collaboration is the key to successfully moving along the continuum from
managing pure project data, and the people who contribute to projects, to
processing that data into useful information for creating repeatable knowledge
management practices. Project teams must be able not only to coordinate their
plans as indicated previously but also leverage recent advances in Web and
Internet technology to actively route, share, edit, and collaborate on common
project artifacts.
Summary
Improving an organization's project management capabilities is rapidly
becoming a central strategy in all application development environments.
However, traditional approaches to project management inefficiently handle the
dynamic and fluid nature of today's application development environments. By
focusing on designing project management processes and systems around the three
Cs (Coordination, Collaboration, and Communication) and using the latest
Internet-based technologies, companies can create an advanced, fully integrated,
collaborative project management framework that provides a long-term solution
for future success.