Application of project log in project management

1. Preface

The particularity of the software project makes it more difficult to develop, the enterprises and teams are facing more and more risks, which leads to the low success rate of the domestic software project. For the existing problems in the project, the major impact of the following areas:

1. Insufficient planning and process tracking

In development activities, the project plan is the first major event after the project is launched, but it is often overlooked or not given the attention it deserves.

A project plan is a traffic map of a project that directs the project to the exact goal, even if it is not a formal document submitted to the client and should be a normative document within the project team. But the project plan is often made by the project manager or in the head of the project manager, only the project manager knows. Such project plans are rough and fuzzy, and since the project plan is developed by the project manager, the other members of the project team can only be executed passively. Project managers can neither be a generalist in the project nor be able to work in lieu of other members, so a project plan that is not approved by a member is equal to the absence of a project plan.

Why do you need a project plan for each project, and to form a normative document? This is because:

First, through the development of plans, so that the team members, the project-related matters, such as resource provisioning, risk resolution, personnel arrangements, time schedule, internal and external interface to form a consensus, to form a prior agreement, to avoid disputes after the incident is unclear;

Second, through the plan, some supporting work and parallel work can be arranged in time, so as to avoid the mutual 牵掣 between the sub-processes due to poor planning. For example, the choice of testing tools, personnel training needs to be planned and arranged early.

Third, can make the project team personnel clear their responsibilities, easy to self-management and self-motivation;

The plan can effectively support the management, as the project manager, business Manager, QA Manager, Test manager of the development work tracking and inspection basis;

By making a plan beforehand, you can focus on solving the problem without having to think about what to do next.

The plan is one of the inputs to the project summary, and the project summary is the process of comparing the actual operation with the project plan to refine the experience and lessons. Through planning and summarizing, the experience and lessons learned from the project process become the knowledge accumulation of the company and project team members.

At the same time, many companies often have more elaborate plans, but plans are planned, and execution is performed.

Once the plan is worked out, put on the shelf immediately, or just as a tool to deal with the user, whether in the actual implementation in accordance with the plan in time to implement, whether to postpone, whether overspending, etc., take a step to see a step, where to calculate where the management method.

Practical work to implement project plans often encounters difficulties. Some organizational culture there is a concept that the plan is a constraint, anyway, we have to push forward on the right, there is no need to tie their hands and feet; Another situation is that we do not work according to the habit of planning, although the plan is done, do it by the way, project managers do not have the habit of maintenance plan, the project began not long The project manager was immersed in solving specific technical problems, and the plan was completely put aside.

2. Insufficient control of demand change

As a software developer or software system customer, I believe we have experienced the need to modify the system because of changes in requirements, in general, the customer will ask to change the interface, change the mode of operation, or even change the business, said, I was so asked, but now our business adjusted ... At this point need to interrupt the work in progress, need to verify the past information, need to revise the plan, need ....

Requirements include business requirements, user requirements, and functional requirements.

Business requirement reflects organizational or customer requirements for high-level systems and products, user requirement describes the tasks that the user must complete to use the product. Functional Requirements (functionalrequirement) define the software features that developers must implement. In the software system development process, there are many problems are due to the demand analysis stage did not correctly collect, write, negotiate, modify the product real demand, resulting in a number of reasons for this situation:

First, the understanding of the needs of the differences, when the customer asked the needs of the demand analyst is often expressed in natural language, such an expression for the real needs is a description (or even a description of the angle), far from the assurance that such a description can be fully understood correctly, Perhaps in the first moment of communication with customers buried the understanding of the seeds of differences, to a customer said I want to be an elephant, body like a wall, ears like a fan, four legs like four pillars, tail like a rope, analysts think, oh, wall, fan, pillars, rope these I know, But when it's really done, the customer will of course jump up. This is the problem of understanding the differences, there are customer statements of responsibility, but also reflects the lack of communication between the two sides, the project manager is an important part of the work is "communication." The project manager should constantly organize and coordinate and even participate in and communicate with users.

Second, the system implementation time is too long, the construction of a large and medium-sized system may have to continue for a period of time, when the customer asked, he was not able to see the operation of the system, when the two sides think there is probably no disagreement between the time (in fact there will be a deadline), the developer began to work. When the customer to get almost the product can be tried, he can actually operate, this time he will be on the system interface, operation, function, performance and so on have some personal experience, it is possible to propose requirements change requirements;

Third, customer specific circumstances, there may be a high degree of competition in the customer industry, need to make adjustments and responses, then they will naturally often ask for changes in requirements; there may be customers in the industry operation is not standardized, there are many human factors, this time the developers are required to prepare the contingency It is not possible to circumvent this problem if the development itself requires changes in requirements from the developer's own version upgrades or performance improvements and design revisions.

So even if there is no understanding between the analyst and the customer differences, the actual system will still put forward some personal opinions, even if there is no personal opinion, their own business changes or changes in the environment, these are unavoidable, so we should not dream of customer demand unchanged, When we start a project, we should realize that there will be some changes in customer needs.

So what are we going to do about this situation? Customer is God, we are like before, with the customer's needs to constantly modify the software, to the final duration of the extension, staff fatigue, cost doubled, customer satisfaction reduced, the original design will also change fragmented, the system is difficult to maintain. 2. Project Log

For the above problems, at present, has been proposed a variety of solutions, here is not too much to describe, here, I just want to put forward, through the project log, can effectively reduce the development risk, improve the success rate of the project.

The project manager must always have a detailed understanding of the status of the project so that others can know the cause of project delays or project overruns, and the need for additional resources. Editing all of this data usually takes a lot of time, so project managers often need to squeeze in time to do the work.

Creating a project log is a very simple thing to do. You can use logs as a centralized management for tracking project issues, action terms, change requirements, and risk. All members of the project team can easily enter information in a standard format, generate reports, and view information.

Below, I will make a brief introduction to the project log template that we have actually used in the project.

Project Log
Project Name:		Number:
Project Manager:		Date:
Project phase:
Status of Progress:	-plan-Ahead plan-lag plan
Workload:	Hours
Job Description:
Customer needs	Reply
1		1
2		2
3		3
4		4
5		5
Problem:
Note:
Related documents:

In this table, in the Project Stage column, the project phase is selected from the following stages:

Project Stage	Job Description
Project Scope Planning	Determine project scope
	Identify Project Resources
	Project Scope Planning completed
Demand analysis	Define the scope of requirements analysis
	Demand Analysis and research
	Draft a preliminary requirement analysis report
	Project team Review Requirements Analysis report
	Modify Requirement Analysis Report
	Customer Accreditation Requirements Analysis Report
	Modify a project plan
	Project Team Review Project plan
	Customer approved project plan
	Analytical work completed
Design	Develop functional specifications
	Develop prototypes based on functional specifications
	Review functional specifications
	Modify functional specifications based on feedback
	Design work completed
Development	Review functional specifications
	Determination of modular/layered design parameters
	assigning Tasks to developers
	Writing code
	Developer Testing (Preliminary commissioning)
	Completion of development work
Test	Develop unit test plans according to functional specifications
	Develop overall test plan according to functional specifications
	Review Modular Code
	Test whether the component module complies with the product specification
	Identify anomalies that do not conform to product specifications
	Modify Code
	Re-test the modified code
	Unit Test Complete
	Testing the integration of modules
	Identify anomalies that do not conform to the specification
	Modify Code
	Re-test the modified code
	Overall test complete
Training	Develop training specifications for end-users
	Develop training specifications for product technical support personnel
	Identify training methods
	Preparation of training materials
	Study the availability of training materials
	Final processing of training materials
	Develop training mechanisms
	Training materials Completed
Document	Develop a "help" specification
	Developing the Help system
	Review the Help document
	Modify the Help document based on feedback
	Develop User manual specifications
	Writing User Manuals
	Review all user documentation
	Modify user documentation based on feedback
	Document completion
Deployment	Determine the final deployment strategy
	Determine the Deployment method
	Get the resources you need to deploy
	Training Technical Support staff
	Deploying software
	Deployment Work Complete
Summarize	Archive lessons Learned records
	Prepare the project summary report
	Establish a software maintenance team
	Summary complete

After the project is finished, depending on the project log, you can generate the following summary table:

Project Log Analysis Table
Project Name:		Item Number:
Project Manager:		Date:
Project start time:		Project End Time:
Stage	Workload	Status of Progress
Project Scope Planning
Demand analysis
Design
Development
Test
Training
Document
Deployment
Summarize

3, Case analysis This project is to build a remote intelligent diagnosis system in a telecom operation Enterprise. The specific software architecture is shown in the following diagram:

Project Plan

1. Project plan

In 80 days, with the resources of 15 people, developed a system that can realize the remote intelligent diagnosis of enterprise products, request to visualize and diagnose the collected product data in real time, and store the data in the database for further updating the rule base.

2. Project work package decomposition in order to distribute tasks and manage them, it is necessary to break down the project in detail according to the project scope. The WBS of the system is the common basis of information communication, and it is also the means of system synthesis and control. The WBS of the remote intelligent Diagnosis System is shown in the following figure.

1, the project schedule

Once the system's WBS has been worked out, the scheduling of the system can be planned. The schedule of the remote Intelligent Diagnosis System is listed in the following table.

4. Project Schedule Control

Once the project baseline plan has been established, the management is to monitor the process to ensure that everything goes according to plan. The project control process includes the collection of information on project performance every 7 days, then compares the performance of the century to the planned performance, and if the actual ratio is worse than the plan, take corrective action and shorten the time interval for monitoring. If the actual progress is lagging behind the baseline plan, change the baseline plan to ensure that the plan is realistic and up-to-date. At the same time, the updated plan is reflected in the diagram.

5. Project Summary

The project summary of the remote intelligent Diagnosis System includes the evaluation meeting chaired by the project manager, the project manager's private meeting with some of the project members, and the activities to determine the technical training issues. The results of the meeting were all filed for later use.

In this project, the project developer should fill in the project log, the project log is as follows:

Project Log
Project Name:	Remote Intelligent Diagnosis System	Number:	2003-002
Project Manager:	Xxx	Date:	2003-7-26
Project phase:	Development
Status of Progress:	-plan-Ahead plan- lag plan
Workload:	32 hours
Job Description:	Adjust HTML pages
Writing a background class module
Customer needs	Reply
1	Request for additional analysis modules	1	Need to change the design, postpone the duration, do not increase
2	Require interface modification	2	can modify
3		3
4		4
5		5
Problem:	Due to xxx separation, resulting in the interface part is not responsible, should increase personnel as soon as possible, otherwise will delay the duration.
Note:
Related documents:

4. conclusion

In summary, through the project log and other means can effectively reduce project risk, improve project success rate.