Personnel Configuration Management for small and medium IT Enterprise Project Teams

Source: Internet
Author: User

Recently, I have been working on projects in the company and have some knowledge about team management. I wanted to write my own project management stuff, because my experience in project management is not very thick, after searching related articles on the internet, I feel similar to my recent feelings. The essentials are as follows:

For most small and medium-sized IT enterprises in China,The management level of these small and medium-sized IT enterprises is at a low level due to reasons such as the short establishment time, a large number of investors, insufficient business continuity, and family-based management.Especially in the management of software project development, project team personnel configuration and management, positions and responsibilities, communication and coordination, and other issues exist. The enterprise needs to reasonably configure personnel based on its own characteristics and project conditions, and coordinate positions, responsibilities and permissions between project managers, system analysts, system designers, programmers, testers, and implementers, to ensure the reliability, continuity and consistency of the project in the development process, it not only conforms to the idea of software engineering, but also meets the customer's quality requirements based on process control.

1. Summary of current situation and project management of small and medium IT Enterprises

The domestic IT industry has a strong desire and driving force for independent entrepreneurship, but the current situation behind such innovation has produced a series of small and medium IT enterprises, in particular, a large number of small enterprises have caused problems such as high IT industry dispersion and low overall efficiency in China. In addition, a large number of multinational IT enterprises are constantly pouring into China. They bring the development capabilities of large IT projects and high-end it products, which will give Chinese IT engineers experience and reference, innovation in China's IT industry is helpful, and of course the impact on the survival of small and medium IT Enterprises in China is also huge. In this form at home and abroad, small and medium IT enterprises have some new features.

(1) The products and technologies of small and medium-sized IT enterprises are industrial and unique. YesHave a deep understanding of an industry or a certain field and provide corresponding solutions.However, the technologies of small and medium-sized IT enterprises are short-lived and non-core, so they cannot quickly generate market scale and economic benefits, regardless of the company scale or product scale, there is a clear gap between small and medium-sized IT enterprises and large IT enterprises at home and abroad.

(2) the human resources of small and medium-sized IT enterprises have high mobility. Professor Mao Jiye, vice president of the Business School of Renmin University of China, pointed out in "2007 China independent software innovation report":"IT enterprises have no other resources, that is, labor costs."It enterprises in China are generally not large in size. To a large extent, it is because it is difficult to retain talents. The brain drain limits the size of the enterprise, while the small size limits the further development of the enterprise. To some extent, this has become a chain reaction, making the capacity of most small and medium IT enterprises very limited in terms of sustainable development.

(3)The Project Management of Small and Medium IT enterprises is extensive and random.There are many IT industry standards, including ISO2000 quality specifications, CMM development specifications, ITIL and other IT service specifications. These industry specifications have become a high threshold, it has a certain impact on small and medium-sized IT enterprises with extensive and random management in undertaking software development businesses, project development management, technical support, maintenance and services, it even threatens the survival space of small and medium-sized IT enterprises. From the perspective of improving their competitiveness and obtaining the sustainable development of enterprises, small and medium-sized IT enterprises must constantly standardize and improve their management level.

For small and medium-sized IT enterprises that focus on software development, the ability of project management is a direct manifestation of their management level, reflecting the degree to which enterprises combine human, technology and management. This article takes the human resource management in the PMBOK Management Knowledge System of the American Project Management Association as the starting point, focuses on the configuration and management of the roles, division of labor, responsibilities, and other details of various personnel in the software project development team, which can regulate the internal management system of the enterprise, it can also enhance the level of communication and coordination between enterprises and customers.

2. Project Team Management Model for small and medium-sized IT Enterprises Based on SDLC

2.1 software development lifecycle (SDLC) Overview

The life cycle of software development is the life cycle from software generation to decommission. It mainly includes problem definition, feasibility analysis, overall description, system design, coding, debugging and testing, acceptance and operation, maintenance upgrade to waste, and so on. It is an iterative process of continuous improvement, in the software development process, small and medium IT enterprises, according to their own resources, especially the development team's human resources, SDLC can be divided into the following four phases from the perspective of accelerating development, ensuring product quality, and facilitating communication and coordination with customers: requirement Analysis, software implementation, system deployment, and system maintenance. 1. The division of SDLC is in line with the characteristics of small and medium-sized IT enterprises, which makes reasonable use of human resources and facilitates the project management of software development.

2.2 SDLC-based project team staffing

Because each project team member has their own professional expertise and personality characteristics, the knowledge and skills evaluation, personality characteristics analysis, advantages and disadvantages of each project member should be analyzed and considered in advance, is the establishment of the project team reasonable,Whether the project-related personnel meet the project's needs is the key to smooth the project. Finding the wrong person or putting the person in the wrong position may lead to project failure.According to the division of SDLC, a flexible project team staffing scheme is adopted at each stage. 1 shows that the standard staffing mode "1 + 2" is adopted for the demand analysis and system maintenance phases; the "1 + 4" standard staffing mode is adopted for the software implementation and system deployment phases. Based on factors such as the size of the enterprise, labor costs, and the knowledge structure of team members, the "1" responsibilities representing the project manager will be constantly adjusted and changed to meet the requirements of the enterprise and customers; in addition, the members in "2" and "4" can flexibly increase or decrease based on the workload, ensuring the continuity of each stage and making the smooth transition of the development process, it can also ensure the full and reasonable utilization of personnel and maximize the advantages of small and medium IT enterprises.

2.3 Project Team Roles and Responsibilities

The entire process of software development includes activities such as structure, requirements, design, development, testing, and configuration management. These activities correspond to different roles in the project team. The roles and positions of project members must be clearly divided based on the team size and characteristics of the project, in this way, each member of the team can have clear responsibilities and goals. After job division in the project, each job member can also have multiple part-time roles to form a matrix of related standard roles and responsibilities. As shown in table 1: 2.4 several staffing modes can be adopted in Project Team Management

Depending on the size of the enterprise and the size of software projects, you can flexibly combine and adjust the roles and responsibilities above, focusing on project managers, merge or increase or decrease the roles and positions of the project team, A combination of "1 + 1" or "1 + 3" is formed on the basis of "1 + 2" and "1 + 4" to ensure the best combination of personnel, the following three staffing modes can be used to complete development tasks with high quality and maximize the use of human resources for multiple purposes.

(1) "1" + "1 + 1 + 1 + 1" Configuration Mode

For small-scale software development, or small enterprises,The number of project teams is 3 ~ Five people, the Project Manager itself is a technical expert, and other personnel of the project team only serve as auxiliary personnelFor example, you can designate one maintainer to coordinate with the project manager for research and maintenance; designate one programmer to coordinate with the project manager for software development and implementation. In this mode, a project manager can view the entire situation and take charge of the vast majority of the work in the four phases of SDLC. At this time, the project manager has the widest range of responsibilities. The project management work includes formulating product objectives, developing detailed task tables for each job, and tracking the implementation of these tasks, carry out control, organize meetings to review the procedures, and summarize the specific situation, make trade-offs and decisions on different schemes, coordinate the relationships between participants of various projects, and collect statistics and summary of problem tracking records at each stage, handle problems in the project process in a timely manner, control the quality of software development in each cycle, and ensure the progress and quality of software development; the work in technology development includes requirements research, system design, program design and testing. Therefore, small project teams have high requirements on the business, technical and communication management skills of the Project Manager. The ability and skills of the Project Manager often determine the success or failure of the entire software project.

(2) "1" + "1 + 2 + 2 + 1" Configuration Mode

ForFor small IT enterprises with a certain scale and strength, project managers can jump out of the technical scope and do not intervene in module design and coding activities, instead, we should focus on project progress control and quality assurance.For example, you can designate a programmer who is mainly responsible for software development and implementation. Project managers generally have strong technical capabilities. Therefore, project managers can take on the research of some new technologies to be used in the project, and solve some difficult problems in the project. The project manager should also review the code of the design and development personnel in a planned manner, confirm with the project team members about the issues found such as standardization, performance, and reuse, and write them into the project development specifications.

  In this mode, the project manager focuses on project management and communication with customers.The software with high user satisfaction can be developed only when user requirements are clearly confirmed. The focus of the R & D manager is to be responsible for the entire development process, including further decomposing the tasks for the progress and objectives confirmed by the project manager, and arranging subsequent incremental and iterative plans. The Project Manager only participates in discussions and reviews. It can better track and coordinate the development process. The R & D manager focuses on the project, avoiding excessive communication and coordination with external stakeholders. For the development of the project team to 5 ~ When there are 10 persons, the testing work in the project must be completed by dedicated testers. Generally, the ratio of the tester configuration is 4 ~ One dedicated tester is required for six developers. Testers conduct system tests from the perspective of third parties and simulated users to better discover system bugs and problems and effectively ensure the quality of the system.

(3) "1" + "1 + 3 + 3 + 1" Configuration Mode

ForMedium-sized IT EnterprisesThe scale of its project team has grown to 12 ~ When there are 20 people, the project team can basically count as small and medium project teams.At this time, the project manager is fully dedicated to project management, including project progress planning, project tracking and monitoring, risk analysis and control, and project measurement analysis and decision-making.You can designate a demand analyst to analyze user requirements and system requirements in the early stage. At the same time, the project team sets up a dedicated architecture designer, focuses on the overall system design scheme, the overall system integration scheme, and the integration of specific functional units and modules. In addition, due to the expansion of the project scale, the configuration items of the project are more complex. The project also needs to take into account multiple branches, such as development, testing, and integration. Therefore, you must set up a dedicated configuration administrator to manage project configurations. When a new version needs to be developed for a project and the released maintenance version needs to be improved, a dedicated maintenance personnel should be set up in the project. Maintenance personnel are responsible for improving the project's small functions and fixing bugs. In this way, new version designers can focus more on developing new functions.

3. Conclusion

First, it introduces the rapid development of the current IT industry, indicating that small and medium IT enterprises are facing new opportunities and challenges, taking into full consideration the current situation and requirements of enterprise informatization at home and abroad, the characteristics of small and medium IT enterprises, and a series of problems existing in software development project management of small and medium IT enterprises, in particular, the project team management issues are analyzed, combined with the characteristics of small and medium-sized IT enterprises themselves, based on SDLC scientific and rational staffing, three corresponding project team management modes are proposed, small and medium-sized IT enterprises in different situations can weigh and trade-offs the management modes of these project teams based on their own situations and needs. Other enterprises can also refer to this mode, establish and improve IT planning and project management in the enterprise, and give full play to the role of IT in enterprise development.

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