Software Development Progress Management

1. What is software project management?

Software project management refers to the process of determining the scope as needed, formulating the Project Plan as needed, and implementing the management as planned. The fundamental purpose of strengthening project management in various stages of software development is to enhance the control system of software development and improve the quality of software development. The construction of software projects can be divided into project initiation, start-up, demand analysis, system design, system development, system testing, system launch, project acceptance and post-launch evaluation according to the life cycle method of software projects..

To strengthen software project management is to take all aspects of software engineering as the main management line, and carry dynamic project management throughout the process, through the integration management of six core elements of Software Development: Project Scope, project progress, project quality, project communication, human resources, and project cost, the efficiency of software development management is maximized, this greatly improves the quality of software development.

Ii. Definition and Implementation of Software Project Progress Management

Software Project Progress management refers to the process in which the project manager Prepares a plan based on the project requirements, implements the plan, and regularly checks the actual implementation of the plan during the process, analyzes the causes of the Progress deviation, and makes continuous adjustments on this basis, modify the plan until the project is delivered and used. Control the progress influencing factors and coordinate various relationships, and make comprehensive use of various feasible methods and measures, control the project plan within the pre-defined scope of objectives, while taking cost into account and quality control objectives, while striving to shorten the time.

Project Progress Management can be completed through the following methods: Prepare a project milestone management running table; hold regular project status meetings, where the software development Party reports the progress and problems, and the user puts forward opinions; compare the actual start date of each task with the planned start date, and determine whether the formal project milestones are expected to be completed.

3. How to prepare the project schedule

Identify the scheduler owner

Identifying the owner or the person responsible for developing all or part of the project progress plan is necessary to ensure that a good progress plan is developed. We recommend that you use the WBS (Job breakdown structure) or organization breakdown structure as the basis for progress development, because WBS specifies the scope, organization Breakdown Structure (OBS) specifies the delivery functional area.

Determine tasks and milestones

For each minimum level of WBS elements, identify the elements that correspond to the task and milestone delivery. Deliverables are usually set as milestones and activities that generate deliverables are called tasks. A milestone is a time point used to manage checkpoints to measure results.

Sort work activities

After determining the deliverables and milestones, they should be logically sorted to reflect the way they will be executed. Sorting establishes dependencies between tasks and milestones and is used to calculate the progress of delivery products.

Task duration Evaluation

Task duration evaluation is the most challenging part of the project plan, and is also the key to subsequent cost estimation. This is a refined process that runs through the planning process because it is directly affected by staffing and cost estimation activities.

Integrate task plans

Once tasks and milestones are identified, sorted, and planned, a progress plan is available for each delivered product. Without integration, the progress of each part is independent, and therefore the time issues related to the entire project cannot be described.

Review approval progress plan

A large and complex schedule needs to be input from multiple people, and no one has all the knowledge of all aspects of the project that affect the schedule, therefore, the Team should perform a progress plan review to identify problems or improve the progress plan.

4. How to effectively control the progress of software projects

In the current software project development process, both developers and management personnel are increasingly aware of the importance of the project progress. How to control the project progress.

1. The project leader or project manager must have a clear understanding of the entire development cycle of the project. The division of tasks must be one day, not one module, every day, developers and testers must make a rough estimate of their work. That is, every afternoon, a project leader organizes developers to learn about the system and records the system accordingly. Make sure to keep a detailed record of the issues that have been resolved. Pay attention to unsolved problems. Do not backward. Find the root cause.

2. Communication and communication: as a project leader, you must communicate with developers more and mobilize their enthusiasm to learn how to solve the problem, rather than waiting for the problem to be solved. Understanding the actual progress and the degree of proficiency in development tools is of great reference for future task rescheduling.

3. put forward some difficulties for everyone to overcome together, or some technically proficient people to solve them. After the solution is completed, everyone will be familiar with their programming ideas. The frequently used knowledge points must be described in detail. In this way, resources are shared.

4. Make a summary of the project, whether difficult or difficult. If you have any questions, make sure to raise them and make them familiar after the solution is completed. This will help you improve your technical level.

5. Close every day is the key to ensuring the project progress.

5. software skills in Software Project Progress Management

1. Establish the concept of comprehensive coordination

In essence, project management aims to maximize the overall interests of the project and coordinate and unify the project scope, cost, and quality management, comprehensive management process. Therefore, to carry out project management, it is necessary to have all the elements of the project and all the special management, and to carry out a comprehensive and coordinated concept.

First, the scope of IT projects affects the progress of IT projects. Generally, the larger the project scope, the more tasks the project needs to complete, and the longer the project takes. In turn, the less the project scope, the fewer tasks the project needs to complete, the shorter the project time. Therefore, if the project progress is very tight or the delay is very serious, you can discuss with the customer whether the scope can be reduced. If the customer agrees to narrow down the scope, the progress can be effectively shortened.

Similarly, the cost and quality of IT projects also affect the progress. In general, additional costs can add more resources, such as devices and manpower, so that some work can be completed in parallel or overtime.

If the project cannot be completed by schedule, consider whether some of the original tasks can be outsourced. This is one of the coordination aspects of project procurement management and schedule management.

Obviously, when reducing the schedule, you can consider the coordination between the above-mentioned special management, that is, cut down some tasks, reduce the quality of some tasks, subcontract some tasks, and add some task costs.

2. Master the correct Demand Survey Methods

Many project teams immediately come up with user interviews as soon as they mention demand research. From the very beginning of the project, face-to-face interviews with users were not a good requirement research method.

The correct method should first ask the user to provide relevant materials and books that reflect the user's business and start literature research. When reading the document, you can understand some basic business terms of the other party and have a preliminary understanding of the user's business process.

Secondly, if necessary, ask the user to lead the project team to visit the business processes of the user's site, so as to establish a perceptual knowledge of certain terms and business links that are literally not easy to understand.

Third, on this basis, according to the problems found in the literature investigation and field investigation, the interview outline is listed in a targeted manner and interviews with users are conducted. At this time, the interview efficiency and quality will be improved, and users will also have a strong sense of trust because the questions mentioned by the project team are very professional and targeted.
After the interview, some project teams thought that they had obtained real and complete user requirements and started the project design. In fact, some IT projects are sensitive because the interview results must be recorded. In order to avoid their "risks", users will speak in the "official" statement. In this way, the demand may be distorted.

The correct method should be to continue with the fourth task after the interview, that is, issue an anonymous demand questionnaire form. Because it is an anonymous domain name, it is generally possible to collect more real demand information.

The project team that has mastered the correct demand research method can quickly obtain high-quality demand information, shorten the research time, make the design and implementation time richer, and thus shorten the progress.

3. Shorten team establishment and running-in time

From accepting tasks to completing tasks and disbanding teams, a project team generally goes through five phases: formation, run-in, formal, presentation, and disbanding.

In the five phases, the disbanding phase has not significantly affected the project because the project task has been completed. For a project manager, it must be clear that the real work stage is formal and performance stage. The important role of the project manager is to make the establishment and running-in phases of the project team take as short as possible. In this way, the formal and performance phases of the project team will take longer, it is easier to arrange and execute tasks.

6. How to avoid losing control of project progress

1. Serious Consequences of out-of-control schedule

(1) the direct consequence of the out-of-control of the plan will be the suspension of the normal completion time of the system. This consequence will increase the burden on the owners, including the continued investment in time, manpower, material resources and financial resources. In serious cases, project stagnation and stranded may occur.

(2) progress out of control and quality out of control affect each other. In general, quality control and progress control are a pair of twin siblings who initiate a chain reaction to each other, and progress out of control may lead to quality out of control. Similarly, the quality is out of control, and the progress is out of control.

(3) If the progress is out of control, it will break through the planned cost of the project. After the project execution is delayed, more resources need to be invested to solve the existing problems and re-develop the plan. Even if the workload does not increase, the increase in time is the increase in costs, that is, the increase in investment.

2. Several measures to avoid delay in the Schedule

(1) Lock demand and avoid endless changes.

Each project needs to be locked before implementation. Otherwise, the project will fail. In the process of project development, some scope changes may occur more or less. Therefore, we must strictly control these changes, have a solution to these changes, and control the scope of changes within the controllable scope, otherwise, there will be many complications, resulting in a lag in the Schedule and an increase in costs.

(2) A very important prerequisite for re-checking the project schedule is project estimation. The biggest foundation of project estimation is based on experience values, the experience of software engineering only reflects the practice of the industry and does not reflect every team. Therefore, the project estimation should be based on the historical experience of your team, so that every member of the project team can participate in the estimation to ensure the feasibility of the project plan, in this way, the system design and coding implementation should not exceed the planned estimation of the schedule.

(3) Poor execution of an effective schedule check tool will cause a project failure in both cost and time, which will eventually lead to the failure of the entire project. Many failed project development lessons reveal that checking tools that fully describe the project progress is too important. The most valuable experience I have gained is to seize the key links in the project development process and pay close attention to the progress. In case of problems, practical measures should be taken immediately. When there is a delay that may seriously affect the schedule, reevaluate the requirement analysis results, estimate the number of jobs, and design results based on the current situation. Do not rush to take measures such as head-to-head and foot-to-foot, resulting in a longer delay in the schedule.

(4) The goal of balancing progress control among various project objectives is the same as that of cost control and quality control. The project progress, quality, and cost constitute a mutually constrained triangular relationship and need to be balanced. If, after evaluation, the project progress is indeed beyond control, it should be determined at the cost of sacrificing a certain goal in the scope of software functionality, scope of work results, cost budget, schedule, or software quality, to keep the most important goals of the project, and finally determine the most appropriate solution. It is unrealistic to expect that the progress will disappear without corrective and intervention measures. Therefore, if these project parameters are beyond the scope of the project objectives, you must immediately take corrective actions; if you find that these project parameters are beyond the scope of the project objectives, you must take preventive measures immediately.

(5) There must be corresponding control measures to ensure the implementation of the reward and penalty system development schedule. For example, some reward and punishment systems can be developed. rewards are the primary and punishment is an auxiliary means to mobilize the enthusiasm of all personnel. Through the establishment of appropriate evaluation indicators, the project implementation as the important performance of the project personnel for assessment and supervision, to avoid the overall project delay due to the lack of cooperation of a small number of people, ensure the smooth completion of tasks from the system.