Introduction to Project Management

• Introduction
• Purpose
• Relations to Other Workflows
• Concepts

Introduction

Software Project Management is the art of balancing competing objectives, managing risk, and overcoming constraints to deliver, successfully, a product which meets the needs of both customers (the payers of bills) and the users. The fact that so few projects are unarguably successful is comment enough on the difficulty of the task.

Purpose

Our goal with this section is to make the task easier by providing some context for Project Management.  It is not a recipe for success, but it presents an approach to managing the project that will markedly improve the odds of delivering successful software.

The purpose of Project Management is:

• To provide a framework for managing software-intensive projects.
• To provide practical guidelines for planning, staffing, executing, and monitoring projects.
• To provide a framework for managing risk.

However, this workflow of the Rational Unified Process does not attempt to cover all aspects of project management. For example, it does not cover issues such as:

• Managing people: hiring, training, coaching
• Managing budget: defining, allocating, etc.
• Managing contracts, with suppliers and customers

This workflow focuses mainly on the specific aspect of an iterative development process:

• Risk management
• Planning an iterative project, through the lifecycle and for a particular iteration
• Monitoring progress of an iterative project, metrics

Relation to Other Workflows

The Project Management Workflow provides the framework whereby a project is created and managed. In doing so, all other workflows are utilized as part of the project work:

• Business modeling workflow
• Requirement workflow
• Analysis and Design workflow
• Implementation workflow
• Test workflow
• Deployment workflow

The Project Management Workflow is one of the supporting process workflows, together with:

• Configuration and change management workflow
• Environment workflow

Concepts

The Project Manager should be familiar with the following concepts. Some of them are specific to the Rational Unified Process.

• Cycle, Phases, and Major Milestones
• Iterations and Releases
• Risks
• Metrics
• Prototypes
• Benefits of an iterative approach
• Alternate lifecycle 'patterns'
• Recommended Artifacts

See also the glossary and the references.