What is Software Project Management: 9 Major Activities and Risk Management of SP

What is Software Project Management: 9 Major Activities and Risk Management of SP

Software Project Management

In software engineering, every field has its own feature and responsibility to bring a project in front of clients which are used for several good purposes.

Software engineering is one of the vast fields where jobs are categorized into several different parts.

The complete IT Company is now working on two different parts these are:

• Software Project Management
• And the actual creation of software by the software developers.

What is a Project?

In order to achieve a goal, a project is defined as a collection of several operations with a well-defined task, a collaboration of software developers.

If we describe that what a project really is then it is the working of more than 3 months and also has fewer than 20 people working on it then it is called a complete project according to the different experts.

A project is actually activity e for the creation of a unique project but if the activities are broken into different parts and complex different routine activities then it is not considered as a project.

Every project in the software development life cycle has a goal of how to make a unique product?

A Software project has some of the Characteristics and Features these are:

1. One of the first characteristics of a project is that it has a unique distinct goal with a unique feature.
2. The project is started and ends at the time to finish a complete project for delivery.
3. In an organization, project creation is one of the temporary phases by the organization team which has no routine activities or day to day operations.
4. Every project has needed of servals resources, manpower, and of course finance material and budget.

What is Software Project Management?

A software project management is one of the disciplined project schedules and procedure to build, test, and maintain the complete project according to some methodologies which is achieved in a specific period of time.

Software project management is one of the biggest fields in software engineering which is the collaboration of 1 or any organization across the department for a single objective or goal.

Software project management has its own characteristics these are:

1. Timeline

The Project management timeline is the schedule a date fixed for the creation and development of a project with start and end. Every timeline is fixed with the characteristics of a project whether it is a long term project for a short time project consists of a few days.

2. Resources

Resources are one of the main usages of software development teams to achieve a goal. Without any resources any organization cannot work to achieve a goal there are several resources like budget, stationery, and other resources like manpower.

3. Tools

Tools are the helping products all software that is used in software project management to manage all the activities. Some of the tools are Gantt Charts and some of the methods are used for the program evolution.

4. Team and Developers

One of the important aspects of project development and Management is the team of developers. In a team, there are several persons involved with their own feels like designing, coding, and testing.

Other characteristics of project management software’s are:

1. Collaboration

2. Scheduling

3. Tracking issues

4. Project portfolio management

5. Project documentation

6. Resource Management

Types of Project Management Software’s

If we discuss project management types then there are two basic types of project management software these are:

1. Desktop Project Management Software

It is one of the common types of project management software which can we manage entirely in MS. For the development of desktop software

2. Web-Based

Web-based is another project management software that is used online on how to write down different project related activities especially with goals and milestones.

What is the Need for Software Project Management?

If we discuss types of software project then and we can conclude that there are two main types of software projects which are long terms software project and short term software projects which consists of a few days.

For the very first time when teams of developers and software engineers start working on a project whether it is a short term project for the long term they also think.

Why we need software project management? One of the best answers to why we need project management? Is that every project has a time period which starts and end time but it has some of the essential things which are:

1. Time
2. Cost
3. Scope
4. Quality

These three parts are one of the essential things for project development. For the quality product, we have to include these four parts in every software project assigned by a client that’s why we need software project management.

Time has a great impact because a software project should we deliver to the client at a time. After that it cost is one of the great factors which has several impacts on software management and also in the software development life cycle.

Quality insurance and scope of the project are also the main factors upon which boundaries for the usage of the product and the working are discussed.

Project Management Activities

Every project management consists of several different activities because of cost, time, scope, and quality of a project as these essential things are managed with proper planning and activities. A software project has some of the activities during the software development life cycle.

1. Project Planning
2. Scope Management
3. Project Estimation
4. Project Scheduling
5. Resource Management
6. Project Risk Management
7. Project Management Tools
8. Project Communication Management
9. Project Execution and Monitoring

1. Project Planning

At the beginning of software development software project management is planned by the project planning. Project planning has several processes before the actual production of a product.

The project Planning process consists of a set of activities to implement user requirements in software with the series of others planning for the end product.

There are several Project Planning processes these are:

1. Set objectives and scope of the project
2. Discuss the project schedule and milestones with the existing resources required for the project
3. In the project planning process, the risk is also discussed which is associated with software development.

A Project Planning Process Consists of the Following Activities.

1. Identification of project requirements
2. Identification of cost estimates
3. Identification of risk and critical factors
4. Commitment to the project preparation and charter

Every software development project management processes consist of several plans which are actually linked with complete software these plans are:

Quality Assurance Plan

It is one of the important plans to ensure that the deliverable project is acceptable in terms of quality before delivered to the client.

Verification and Validation Plans

Verification and validation plans which art project references to check out there the project is developing under the existing resources or not it is also checked out the project correctness according to the provided software requirement specification (SRS).

Configuration Management Plan

A configuration management plan is the redefining of an existing project by their objectives and deliverables.

Maintenance Plan

The maintenance plan is actually the maintenance of software in terms of their functional roles and responsibilities.

Staffing Plan

The staffing plan is the stuff planner provides the information which person should we hire on the specific project component. It also gives information about the skills required for the specific task and also provides information for the specific 21 which are going to be used by the project management team.

2. Scope Management

In software project management a boundary of a project is declared by defining its functionality at the quantifiable task which is limited with some of the features included. In scope management, all of these things are included which is actually documented for further cost and time management. It is one of the essential management in software product management because it contains all of the activities which are going to performed by software managers and developers and testers.

Our scope management consists of several important aspects these are:

1. It defines clear boundaries which are the actual scope of a project management system.
2. Also decided it’s all of the controls inside of the scope with validation and verification.
3. The scope management system has its own advantage because it divides the project into different scopes which are the actual different smaller parts.
4. Scopes make the software management system easy to manage.
5. The scope management system has the ability to verify all the scopes with proper documentation
6. All the scopes can easily be controlled by the scope management system to verify all the changes in any scope.

3. Project Estimation

One of the biggest challenges for a project manager in software project management is to manage all of the project constraints like scope, time, cost resource, quality, and risk for the proper estimation of the project.

For this reason, project estimation is one of the essential plan, and in software project management to control the project more efficiently and effectively.

A project manager has several questions in mind before the estimation of the project these questions could be:

1. How to estimate the projects with techniques and other plans?
2. How much work is to be estimated in terms of scope in software project management?
3. Who will be doing the project (resources)
4. How much cost required to deliver the project?

As usually project estimation includes the following parts to estimate all of the things these are:

Effort Estimation

It is the actual manpower on how to produce the software by the personal requirements and man-hour required for the complete project. Effort estimation required one of the software size estimations.

Software Size Estimation

In software engineering, all of the activities that are used to estimate the size of the software application with complete project component is the software size estimation.

Cost Estimation

In estimation management cost estimation is one of the difficult ones which is responsible to estimate all of the important factors like size of the software, hardware, software quality, communication, additional software tools required for the software project management, and it also includes the cost for traveling and training support.

Time Estimation

The time required to produce software for a complete project is also estimated with time estimation techniques. Time estimation is tracked by day by day a or by the breakthrough of several components that smaller task activities.

Along with this all estimation resource estimation is also performed to track ground all the resources like stationery, training, and other costs.

Project Estimation Techniques

In software project management accurate estimation of the project is necessary to keep track of all of the cost, work, and resource management. There are a few important techniques that are used in project management to estimating all of the necessary things which are involved in project scope.

All of the project managers often used a term which is ‘Ball-park estimates’ which is the estimation of the project at a high level. Along with these project estimation techniques, there are several techniques that can be used in project estimation these are:

Top Best Project Estimation Techniques

Top-down Estimation

This is one of estimation which started from high-level features and design level estimation and go to you down estimation for the smaller chunks and working.

Bottom-Up Estimation

This estimation technique is different and inverse to top-down estimation which actually started from a discrete and small level of estimation and gradually increase to estimate the entire project.

Decomposition Technique

This is one of the techniques which is used for software size estimation in term of the line of code and functions points in a software product.

Three-Point Estimating

This is one of the highly mathematical approaches to estimate work packages buy one of the popular technique known as PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique).

Empirical Estimation Technique

Empirical estimation technique is one of the highly difficult techniques to estimate project size in terms of LOC or FPs of formulas.

Analogous Estimating

Analogous estimation is the technique where a similar project is judged through experts in terms of activities and reference projects.

Parametric Estimate

The Parametric estimation technique is one of the highly accurate estimations for the work offered a line of codes in the software development project.

4. Project Scheduling

In software project management project schedule is a complete road map of all the activities which is decided by the project manager in a specific order within the time slot provided by the client.

It is also referred to as a mechanism to allocate and complete this task ok bye the organizational resources in a time frame. By keeping various factors in mind all of the project managers define various stocks and project milestones in the path to schedule and allocate time for the various components.

How to Schedule a Project?

Project scheduling is one of the phases which occur during the planning phase of the project which we need to schedule for the proper development of the project there are several questions to schedule a project these are:

• Who will do it?

• What needs to be done?

• When will it be done?

Steps Needed to Schedule a Project

1. Define activities with work breakdown structure (WBS) and deliverable diagrams.
2. Do estimates by the broken down of several tasks.
3. Determine dependencies to keep working on several tasks and its dependencies on other tasks and related tasks.
4. Assign resources to all of the tasks which are going to be done by the team.

Necessary Things during the Project Scheduling

1. Project scheduling breakdown and divided time into several work units
2. It also gets an estimated time frame required to complete a single task
3. Along with calculating a single task it also calculates the time required for the complete project from start to finish.
4. It also breaks down the project into several smaller tasks by finding out correlated tasks also.

5. Resource Management

Resource Management refers to the material and other resources that are helpful to complete a project. These resources could be human resources, software code and libraries, and other protective tools.

Before going to resource management it is involved through the project planning which is the actual goal Defined by the client to give a deliverable with the help of project management and project planning. Resource management is one of the aspects of project planning which undertook all the resources and equipment which is going to be used to complete the task.

What is a Resource and why Resource Management is Necessary for Project Management?

A resource is a material, tool, labor for any kind of equipment which is used in software project management to develop a complete project so why resources are managed in project management?

One of the biggest answers to this question is that or resources are available a limited resource or quantity can also stop the complete project scheduling because extra resources can also increase development cost. For these reasons, it is necessary to manage resources allocating advocates resources for each project component.

Resource Management must include the following things:

1. Identification of team members for the project and also allocate possibilities to each team member.
2. Tracking of resource requirements and also their availability for the particular software component for a particular stage.
3. Creation of the referred system
4. Improve and track team members and individual performance.
5. Allocating and deallocating resources by request when they are needed for more than one component.

What is a Resource Manager?

A resource manager in project management is one who actually deals with financial and other aspects of a project. Through the complete Project Planning stage, he has the importance of Resource Management.

A resource manager has the following responsibility in Resource Management:

1. He is responsible for all costs of resources and for cost expenditure.
2. Is responsible for the resource as they are required for a project is available or not?
3. He also ensures that each type of resource for every component needed is identified properly.
4. He is also responsible for the Accountant of all the resources needed as in detail.

What is resource allocation in project management?

Resource allocation in resource management is one of the most important aspects of project management. This is the stage when and a resource is to manage and allocate to the more than one software component and also ensure that they are not disturbed by this location.

A resource manager is one of the people who are responsible to allocate resources in Resource Management and also responsible to handle finance and resources in an effective manner.

6. Project Risk Management

Risk management means risk containment and mitigation and it also involved different activities to analyze not only predictable risk but also non-predictable risks.

A risk is a potential problem that should be resolved before the other components of software development started because it is the possibility of suffering loss and also cause other problems in project management. For these reasons risk management has one of the following tasks:

1. Classify and identify all the risk triggers and prioritize all risks to resolve them.
2. Mitigation plan to deal with all of the risks.
3. Management monitoring during the project
4. Communicate risk status throughout the project management

In risk management there could be more than one risk which can be faced by a project manager these are:

1. Changing of Organizational Management
2. Staff living and hiring new staff
3. At this stage of the project, development requirements can be changed
4. Underestimation of resources and require time for each resource
5. With the technological changes, risks can be we create problems in business competition

Five Types of Risk in Software Project Management

In software project management there could be almost 5 common type risk that can occur these are:

1. New improvement Technologies
2. Organizational Management changing
3. Performance
4. User functional and nonfunctional requirements
5. System architecture and application changing

Risk management process

In risk management of software project management is one of the key steps to deal with potential risk which could be a negative or positive impact on software project management.

A project manager must make a project smarter streamlined and more profitable by managing all the risks so that’s why the risk management process is used to deal with risk are more than the risk in software development.

There are most five common risks which are using nowadays these are:

1. Risk identification

It is the responsibility of your project management teams and developers to uncover and recognize all the possible risks that could occur in project management. And it is also responsible for the team member to note down all the possible risks. There are several techniques that can be used to find out project risk and make the list of its variety. The Project risk register technique can also be used for this.

2. Risk Analysis

After the risk identification, it’s time to analyze the risk and its consequences over the project management. In resource management, each team member has its own goal for the particular software component and he has the good nature to analyze his own risk for the component where he is working.

3. Categorize and rank the risk

In risk management, all risk management and categorized in terms of their severity and its consequences over the project. In this way, the high ranking risk is resolved first and then and goes to the risk which has a low impact on project management.

4. Treat the risk and risk management

Treat risk mean risk response planning which actually modifies this risk to achieve some acceptable result. In this step developers and team members can also minimize the probability and negative effect of the risk and also it is important to manage all the risks so that to avoid other risks.

5. Monitoring in review the risk

This is one of the important steps when your project risk register tool is helpful to monitor all the risk track and review. At this stage potential risk is closely monitored and also analyzes their early symptoms to avoid more risk.

7. Project Management Tools

In software engineering risk and uncertainty rises with respect to project size and when the time of project development according to the set methodologies which face more difficulties.

Why project management tools and software are used to manage software development?

Obviously, project management tools are used for the smooth, effective, efficient working of project development.

Project management tools are those tools which can help in many ways by tracking different activities being carried out in a project. Not only with track different activities but also be assigned and manage other resources and team members in a project to complete a project in time.

If we talk about the project management approach is then there are many project management approaches are used like Agile, PMBOK, PRINCE2, and waterfall approach.

There are many project management tools available in online web-based and also available in cloud and desktop applications.

Which of the things are more considered in project management software?

In project management there must be some of responsibility e and necessary thing these things are:

1. Calculate the budget which is going to spend on the toll
2. Tracking duration and working of the project
3. Track down all the team members working on the project
4. The storage capacity of the software and also handle different resources
5. Every project management software must have communication via Email, file sharing, and from others
6. They must be easy to use and navigate

Project management Tools

1. Gantt Chart

Gantt chart is one of the best tools which was developed by Henry Gantt in 1917. It is one of the best tools which calculates the time period of every project phase in horizontal and vertical bars. It is one of the tools which is mostly used in project management.

2. PERT Chart

If a project has to be managed in a parallel and constructive a path diagram is specially used it is one of the best chart tools which helps programmers and project managers to manage the project in a graphically using a network diagram. This tool has its own unique purposes which are used on several different parts of project management.

3. Resource Histogram

In Resource Management there are several resources like manpower, tools, and other software used to manage such think resource histogram is used which is one of the graphical tools which can easily track different resources especially skilled staff if and other stuff planning and coordination.

In this tool different staff members like a tester, developer, and designer to manage a project in terms of days and staff required for the different project components individually.

4. Critical Path Analysis

Critical Path Analysis toll is one of the amazing and more Complex tools to find out the critical and shortest path to complete a project. In Critical Path Analysis, every event is allocated with a specific time. Software management tools are used for a different short period of time events and other projects, components are managed developers and team members find out one of the shortest paths to complete the project with needed requirements.

Different Types of Softwares Used In Software Engineering

Here are some of the top project management software which has the capability to manage different resources and project components graphically.

1. Trello

2. JIRA

3. Wrike

4. ProWorkflow

5. Zoho Projects

6. Podio

7. Asana

8. Freedcamp

9. Smartsheet

10. Microsoft Project

11. Basecamp

12. ProjectManager

13. LiquidPlanner

14. Clarizen

15. Paymo

8. Project Communication Management

Project communication is one of the most critical and important steps in project management and also develop at the proper time. Effective project communication management plays a vital role in the success of a complete project.

In project communication, a bridge is built between the client and the Organization for the conversation of different system requirements and also get feedback to carry on project development.

In project communication different stakeholders, project member’s teams, and users who mostly interact with the system communicate with each other from different tools and software. This communication could we all are written.

Every communication is managed through a process which is the communication Management process. This has the following steps to communicate and get feedback.

1. Planning

Planning is one of the first steps between different stakeholders who are involved in a project to initiate it.

2. Sharing

It is better to share different various aspects of planning for the proper and effective management of a project or a project component.

In this step, the correct information picked for the correct person and time selection.

3. Feedback and performance report

When project development started on a specific period after the completion of some of the components feedback mechanism is used to know-how project management and development is going on.

This is one of the ways to determine another organization is going in the right way or wrong way.

4. Closure or conclusion

At the end of every software development life, cycle phase the project manager makes a conclusion and sends a formal announcement update to all of the stakeholders why are different communication ways like sending emails or by a hard copy of the document.

9. Project Execution and Monitoring

Project execution and monitoring are some of the most critical and important phases of the software development life cycle. Every software component is executed according to the plan and this way we know everything the execution of different components according to the plan.

Project execution and monitoring are also responsible for the observation of different it risk and possible hurdles for the measurement and management of a project.

Every project manager generates a report at the end of each phase and also responsible for the measuring of the following things:

1. Milestone Checklist

Every project is divided into different multiple phases which are considered as a different milestone That is achieved on different SDLC phases. Every project manager is responsible for the checklist of every milestone in project execution and monitoring.

2. Activity Monitoring

On a daily basis project manager’s track, all of the activities and tasks completed. Daily activity is monitored through different software project management tools to assign a different task to different team members.

3. Status Report

The status report is one of the Conclusion reports is in this report every status is marked with finished, pending, or work in progress.

Today we have different project management tools available online and also offline in the form of Desktop applications. One of the best tools which are famous to track down different working schedules is monday.com.

Monday.com is one of the tools on how to manage different tasks in an effective way.

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