Software Project Management

Bob Hughes, Mike cotterell,

"Software Project Management",
Tata McGraw Hill, New Delhi, 2002
 ACTIVITY PLANNING

Activity planning (Text 1: Chapter 6):: Introduction, The objectives

of activity planning, When to plan, Project schedules, Projects
and activities, Sequencing and scheduling activities.
 Activity Planning
A detailed plan for the project must include a schedule indicating the start
and completion times for each activity. The plan will enable the following

• Ensure that the appropriate resources will be available precisely when

required
• Avoid different activities competing for the same resources at the same
time
• Produce a detailed schedule showing which staff carry out each activity
• Produce a detailed plan against which actual achievement may be
measured
• Produce a timed cash flow forecast
• Replan the project during its life to correct drift from the target
 Activity Planning
• To be effective, a plan must be stated as a set of targets, the
achievement or non-achievement of which can be unambiguously
measured.
• The activity plan does this by providing
– Target start and completion date for each activity

• Starts and completions of activities must be clearly visible

– this is advisable to ensure each and every project activity produces some
tangible product or deliverable
• Monitoring project progress can ensure products of each activity
are delivered on-time
• Project management is concerned with
– Recognizing when some thing has gone wrong
– Identifying causes and revising the plan to mitigate its effect
– Means of evaluating consequences of not meeting any activity target
 Objectives of Activity Planning
• Feasibility assessment: is the project possible within
required timescales and resource constraint?
– However, it is not until we have constructed a detailed plan
that we can forecast a completion date with any
reasonable knowledge of its achievability.

• Resource allocation: what are the most effective ways

of allocating resources to the project. When should the
resources be available? The project plan allows us to
investigate the relationship between timescales and
resource availability.
 Objectives of Activity Planning
• Detailed costing:
– How much will the project cost and when is that
expenditure likely to take place?
– After producing an activity plan and allocating specific
resources, we can obtain more detailed estimates of
costs and their timing.

• Motivation:
– Providing targets and being seen to monitor
achievement against targets is an effective way of
motivating staff, where they have been involved in
setting those targets in the first place.
 Objectives of Activity Planning

• Coordination:
– When do the staff in different departments need to be
available to work on a particular project
– When do staff need to be transferred between
projects?

• Project plan provides an effective vehicle for

communication and coordination among teams.
 Objectives of Activity Planning

• Activity planning and scheduling techniques

place an emphasis on:
– Completing the project in a minimum time at an
acceptable cost
Or alternatively
– meeting a set target date at minimum cost.
 When to plan
• Planning is an on going process of refinement
– Each iteration becoming more detailed and more accurate than the last
– Over successive iterations, the emphasis and purpose of planning will shift

• During feasibility study and project start-up

– Purpose of planning is to:
• Estimate time scales
• Risks of not achieving target completion dates or keeping within budget

• After feasibility study

– Emphasis is on production of activity plans
– Ensuring resource availability and cash flow control

• During project progress and until completion

– Emphasis is in monitoring and re-planning continues to correct any
deviations that prevent meeting time and cost targets
 Project schedules
• Project schedule is prepared before project work begins with details
such as
– Activity(ies) showing start and finish of each activity
– Resources required

• Preparing a project schedule comprises of four stages:

1. Deciding what activities are to be carried out and the order in which they
have to be executed
• Allows to prepare an ideal activity plan which has not constraints
2. Ideal activity plan is subject to activity analysis risk
• To identify potential problem
• Suggesting alterations to ideal plan
3. Resource allocation
• Expected availability of resources may place constraints on when certain activities
can be conducted
4. Schedule production
• After resources are allocated to each activity, draw the schedule and publicize
project schedule
 Project Schedules

• Selection of project
– 1. Scope
– 2. Infrastructure
– 3. Analyze Project characteristics
• Software processes
– Requirements, Design, Development,
Testing
• Process model
– Waterfall, Prototyping, Incremental
delivery, Agile
– 4. Identify Project activities
– 5. Estimate effort
• 6. Identify risks
– For each activity
– 7. Allocate resources
– 8. Review / Publicize plan
• 9. Execute plan
– 10. Lower level planning
• Lower level details
• Review
 Projects and Activities
• Defining Project and activities
– A project is composed of a number of interrelated activities
– A project may start when at least one of its activities is ready to start
– A project will be completed when all of the activities it encompasses have
been completed
– An activity must have a clearly defined start and a clearly defined end-point
– If an activity requires a resource then that resource requirement must be
forecastable
– The duration of an activity must be forecastable
– Some activities require that others are completed before they can begin

• Three approaches to identify activities in project

– Activity based approach
– Product based approach
– Hybrid based approach
 Activity-Based Approach

• Consists of creating a list of all activities

– Brainstorming session involving the whole project team
OR
– An analysis of past projects

• Activities are listed after sub-dividing the project into

the main life-style stages and consider each of these
separately
– This is a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
– Involves identifying main (high level) tasks
– Breaking each into a set of lower level tasks
 Work Breakdown Structure [WBS] Example
• WBS generates a task list with
– main(or high level) tasks required to complete a
project
• Analysis, Design, Build
– Breakdown design into lower-level tasks
• Data design
• Process design
• Physical design
– Further breakdown design into
• Relational data analysis
• Logical data design
– Perform sequencing
• Detail must be given to the depth and
shallow structure
– More depth with result in too many tasks
and difficult to manage
– Shallow structure provides insufficient
detail for project control
• Benefits:
– Result in a task catalogue
– Can be refined as project progresses
• Especially during project analysis and
specification phases
 Product-Based approach
• Consists of producing a
– Product flow diagram(PFD)
• The PFD indicates for each product (artefact) which other products
(artefacts) are required as inputs.
• PDF can be easily transformed into an ordered list of activities by
identifying the transformations that turn some products into others
– Product breakdown structure(PBS)
• Refer WBS in activity based approach
• With the WBS generally a product may not be left out of PBS
But
• It may be possible that activity can be left out of an unstructured activity
list
– Product-based approach is appropriate
1. If using a life cycle methodology such as waterfall
2. If using methodology such as SSADM (Structured system analysis and
design technique) or USDP ( Unified software development process)
– Above 1,2, clearly specifies for each step or task each of the products (artefacts)
required and the activities required to produce it.
USDP PRODUCT BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE BASED ON ARTEFACTS IDENTIFIED
in Jacobson, Booch and Rambauugh (1999)
A Structuring of activities for the USDP requirements capture workflow
based on Jacobson, Booch and Rambaugh (1999)
 The Hybrid Approach
• Is based on structuring of activities
• Alternatively, WBS is based on project’s products resulting in
final list of final deliverables
– With a set of activities for the each deliverables
• With a purely activity-based WBS, identified activities are
sequenced
• Framework with 5 levels recommended in MITP (Managing
the implementation of total project) methodology by IBM
1. Level 1: Project
2. Level 2: Deliverables
3. Level 3: Components
4. Level 4: Work-packages
5. Level 5: Tasks
Hybrid work breakdown structure based on
deliverables and activities
 Sequencing and Scheduling Activities

• Throughout a project we require a schedule that

clearly indicates when each of the projects activities is
planned to occur and what resources it will need.
• The chart shown has been drawn up taking account of
the nature of the development process and the
resources that are available.
• In drawing the chart two things are considered
sequencing the tasks and scheduling them.
• In case of small projects this combined sequencing-
scheduling approach might be quite suitable,
particularly we wish to allocate individuals to particular
tasks at an early planning stage.
 Sequencing and Scheduling Activities

Activity Key
A: Overall design E: Code module 1
B: Specify module 1 F: Code module 3
C: Specify module 2 G: Code module 2
D: Specify module 3 H: Integration testing
I: System testing