Introduction to Project Management
Concepts
Software Project Management is the art of balancing competing objectives,
managing risk, and overcoming constraints to successfully deliver a product
which meets the needs of both customers (the payers of bills) and the users. The
fact that so few projects are unarguably successful is comment enough on the
difficulty of the task.
Our goal with this section is to make the task easier by providing some
context for Project Management. It is not a recipe for success, but it presents
an approach to managing the project that will markedly improve the odds of
delivering successful software.
The purpose of Project Management is:
- To provide a framework for managing software-intensive projects.
- To provide practical guidelines for planning, staffing, executing, and
monitoring projects.
- To provide a framework for managing risk.
However, this discipline of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) does not attempt to
cover all aspects of project management. For example, it does not
cover issues such as:
- Managing people: hiring, training, coaching
- Managing budget: defining, allocating, and so forth
- Managing contracts, with suppliers and customers
This discipline focuses mainly on the important aspects of an iterative
development process:
- Risk management
- Planning an iterative project, through the lifecycle and for a particular
iteration
- Monitoring progress of an iterative project, metrics
The Project Management Discipline provides the framework whereby a project is
created and managed. In doing so, all other disciplines are
utilized as part of the project work:
The Project Management Discipline is one of the supporting process
disciplines,
together with:
It is not our intention in the RUP to present a complete
tutorial on project management. We describe only that subset which is directly
related to our approach to software development, and, of that subset, certain
topics (as noted above) have been ruled out of scope, and are touched on only
lightly, or omitted entirely. The project management approach described here has
been influenced by the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of
Knowledge (PMBOK®), and the reader should consult that work for a complete
coverage of generally accepted best practice in project management. It is
available free of charge from www.pmi.org.
The Project Management Institute (PMI®) is the leading nonprofit professional
organization covering project management; it establishes project management
standards and provides professional certification.
Copyright
© 1987 - 2001 Rational Software Corporation
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Introduction
