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Chapter 7: Building the Project Team 149 GNU Dev Project System Testing Planning Meetings Schedule Budget Development Handouts Classes Scenario Simulations Pilot Testing Warroom Workstations Software UAT Pilot group Production Post-test CBT Courseware Figure 7-1: A WBS helps identify the deliverables and resources. PM Activities QA/QC System Training You won t identify individuals in this matrix, but departments, such as sales and marketing. You may also identify roles, such as the Visual Studio developer, the Oracle database administrator (DBA), and the project sponsor. The idea is to identify the roles of each project participant. You can fill in the names of the individuals who will fill these roles later. Here s what you need to do to create your own roles and responsibilities matrix: 1. Identify the major deliverables of the project. Use the WBS (discussed in Chapter 3) to identify the major deliverables. If your project is still in its infancy, you can use this time to create your WBS. The first column in Table 7-1 identifies the major deliverables.
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148 Part II: Planning Your Software Project Determining Your Project Needs The first step in finding all of the resources needed for your project is to determine what resources are needed in your project. Take advantage of the people in your organization who have expertise about the software product, the programming environment, and so on. These people can help you determine the resources you need. Web application designers, analysts, developers, and database administrators, in particular, are the experts to whom you turn. Revisiting the work breakdown structure To accurately predict resources, you need to know exactly what the project scope entails. Remember the work breakdown schedule (WBS) we mention in Chapter 3? The WBS is a deliverables-oriented decomposition of the project scope. It includes everything the project will create in order to complete the project scope. The WBS is your scope baseline. Figure 7-1 demonstrates a portion of a WBS. In this part of the WBS, you identify products and activities so that you know what roles you need to fill. If your WBS calls for CBT (computer-based training), you will require someone who knows how to create computer-based training materials. Resources are not just people, but materials, facilities, and equipment that you need to buy, rent, or create. For example, the CBT may require new development software, new application licenses, and even hiring a training expert to help with that portion of the project. Creating a roles and responsibilities matrix One of the best tools you can use to identify resources is a roles and responsibilities matrix. The purpose of this matrix is to identify all the individuals, groups, and departments that are affected by the project and to show what project components require these different entities to interact.
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Chapter 7 Building the Project Team In This Chapter Putting your WBS to work for you Balancing leadership and management responsibilities Acquiring the appropriate project resources Determining your project roles and responsibilities Exploring the various organizational structures Associating power and authority with organizational structure Projects are not solo activities. Projects are performed by people, and these people are the folks on your project team. You need your project team to help you plan, estimate, execute, and complete the project. And your project team needs you to help them complete their work, lead the project to completion, and act as a shield against the stakeholders that may badger them for changes, gossip, and updates. The goal is to build a symbiotic relationship. As a software project manager, you really must have two personalities: a leader and a manager. The leader in you must motivate, align, and direct your project team. You want to help your project team members reach their goals and aspire to new challenges. The manager in you, however, is concerned with just one thing: getting the project successfully completed. When you recruit, build, and shape your project team, there must be a balance between leadership and management. On one hand you just want your project team members to get their work done. On the other hand, you d like to inspire them to achieve great results, grow as individuals, and contribute to the project s success. This chapter shows you how to build your project team. In Chapter 11, we address strategies for leading your project team.
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146 Part II: Planning Your Software Project
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Chapter 6: Planning for Software Quality 145 idea that we believe changes should be discouraged in project management. Sometimes changes are absolutely necessary in order to make your stakeholders happy. The two points to consider regarding change control are Consider how changes may affect quality, and address this in your change control plan and your quality management plan. Changes are not evil beings to be avoided. They are a necessary part of any project, and your process for dealing with them should be addressed in your change control plan. What you need is integrated change control. Integrated change control is a method to examine change and its influence on the project as a whole. When changes are proposed, answer all of the following questions: What affect does this change have on the project scope? If your scope grows, then you ll need to reflect additional time and cost considerations to incorporate the change. The inverse is true as well; the customer may want to remove deliverables from the scope, but this doesn t always mean that the cost or quality baselines should be adjusted. Sometimes you ve already invested time and monies into the deliverables they now want removed from the project. What affect does this change have on cost and time? Obviously this question is considered in light of the scope growing or shrinking, but the consumption of time or funds to satisfy a change request may spread your schedule and budget too thin to maintain quality. One of the biggest mistakes software project managers make is trying to please everyone by accepting changes without reflecting time and cost changes. Then they ll overwork their project team to achieve the project objectives, and quality suffers. Don t be that kind of boss.
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144 Part II: Planning Your Software Project Probably not. We can pretend that the ideal sale price for this piece of software is $25 per copy. A business analyst would determine the market size, the percentage of the market that would actually buy the software, and predict the gross profit on your software. The analyst would then work with you to determine how long and how much it d take to actually create the software. The difference between the actual costs of the software creation and the actual sales is the net profit. Now you re getting to optimal quality. The gross profit would have to be greater than the costs to create the software or there s no return on investment (ROI). The optimal quality, in this instance, is how much quality should be built into the software while still allowing for a profit margin. Ideally, the cost of quality is much lower than the final profit margin. That s the equation that keeps businesses in the black. Optimal quality, fun as it is, has two related costs for you to consider: Cost of quality: This is the amount that you have to spend to achieve optimal quality. Chalk up expenses like time for planning, development, and testing, but don t forget the cost of training or direct project expenses like hardware and software. Of course, you can t forget to pay third parties, such as quality assurance testers and consultants like your business analyst. Cost of nonconformance to quality: This is the cost assigned to wasted labor, wasted materials, and rework when your project team delivers poor and faulty code. This cost also ripples out to a loss of sales because of errors, returns, and unhappy customers who bought and relied on your lousy software. When it comes to quality, your goal as a project manager is to first determine the project scope in relation to the cost and required schedule. Then you ll have to consider the costs required to achieve the expected level of quality. In some instances, you ll have to examine the profit margin expected in order to realize what the optimal quality for your project should be. Some project managers worry that if they train their staff they ll leave the company to work for the competition. Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar said, Which is worse: training your staff and potentially losing them or not training your staff and keeping them? Considering quality when making changes One of the biggest influences on quality is changes to the project scope. We discuss change control at length in Chapter 13, but this section explains why you should consider project quality when approving changes. Don t get the
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Chapter 6: Planning for Software Quality 143 Figure 6-3: Quality is affected by the balance of the Iron Triangle. Quality Scope So how much quality is enough? When it comes to software development, you may create a scale of errors, bugs, and gremlins that sneak into the code. For example, you rank the bugs you ve identified from 1 to100, with 100 being the most severe. Any bugs below a score of 20 may be accepted for now, while everything over 20 needs to be fixed. Some organizations, however, would like to aim for a zero-tolerance policy on bugs. Sounds great, but is it possible or profitable? First, consider the possibilities. How do you know an error exists until someone finds it? You can test, complete peer reviews, and hire third parties to examine your code for months or years on end and not find errors. Does this mean there are no errors within the software? No, it just means that none have been found yet. Now, consider the profit. If your organization spends months or years examining, inspecting, and testing code, the market window can easily open and shut for your software before you even get the program packaged. And who pays for all of the inspection? It isn t feasible to demand perfection on most software projects because of the time and expense to prove the existence of perfection (or more accurately, the absence of known errors). Examining optimal quality Optimal quality describes how much quality is expected in return for the cost to achieve that level of quality. For example, you could create a flawless piece of software that allows users to track all of their online purchases, shipping expenses, and even the interest for each item purchased with their credit cards. But, would anyone buy the software if you charged $600? This is what you might end up charging per copy because your project team spent months perfecting and testing the code.
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142 Part II: Planning Your Software Project Using homegrown, in-house quality solutions You don t have to follow any prepackaged approach to quality in order to create quality software. Your organization may have its own internal quality program that you and your project team must follow. And that s just fine. Sometimes in-house programs are more fluid than the rigid programs from outside organizations. The danger, of course, is that a fluid approach may also be seen as a passive approach. The project manager must commit to the in-house quality policy and demand that the project team do the same. Any and all in-house solutions should have the following attributes: A written document that details the organization s quality management approach. Verbal policies don t count. A defined system to identify quality, and identified procedures for performing a quality audit. A quality audit proves that a project has followed the quality policy. Metrics and procedures on how to perform quality control (QC). QC is inspection driven, and the procedures may vary among disciplines within an organization. A boilerplate quality management plan that all projects use to guide project planning, execution, and completion. The quality management plan sets the rules of how a project should perform and defines the expectations of the project manager to achieve the expected quality. Procedures on how to update, change, or challenge the quality management plan. This is an important component because there will likely be circumstances that require the quality plan to flex, change, or evolve. If the quality management plan doesn t define this procedure, then you may fall victim to the old adage: The reason we re doing it this way is because we ve always done it this way. Balancing Time, Cost, and Quality The Iron Triangle of project management, as shown in Figure 6-3, requires that all three constraints of a project remain balanced in order for a project to be successful. Right smack in the middle of the Iron Triangle is quality. This is because if the sides of the triangle are not kept in balance, quality is most likely to suffer. So, if your scope increases, then your time, cost, or both will also need to increase or quality will suffer.
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Chapter 6: Planning for Software Quality 141 Figure 6-2: Organizations operating at the Sixth Sigma allow only 3.4 defects per million. Relative fr y One Sigma from Mean Mean -3-2-101 23 Sigma from Mean The primary points of Six Sigma are We don t know what we don t know. Makes sense, right? A lack of knowledge keeps organizations trapped in their current environment, losing revenue, and preventing progress. We don t do what we don t know. If you don t know what you should be doing you cannot do it. We won t know until we measure. Aha! The real action in Six Sigma is to measure in order to improve. We don t measure what we don t value. Six Sigma looks at what does and does not need to be measured, and then prompts the developer or project manager to act accordingly. If you value your programmers time, your software s errors, and your customer satisfaction, you ll measure them all. We don t value what we don t measure. This is a call to action! What should you be measuring that you re not? Six Sigma from Mean
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140 Part II: Planning Your Software Project 11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management. You can tell your developers to churn out 2,000 lines of code a day, and they ll probably do it. But they won t guarantee that the code will be any good. A quota is not the same as a demand for quality code. 12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship, and eliminate the annual rating or merit system. Developers should be able to take pride in their work and their accomplishments, and be rewarded accordingly. 13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone. Training, especially in IT, is paramount. Without proper education, how can you expect your team to deliver? 14. Put everybody in the company to work accomplishing the transformation. For Deming s approach to work, everyone must participate. A few folks here and there won t make much of an impact in most organizations. Slipping into the sixth sigma Unless you ve been living in a cave or coding COBOL for the past few years, you ve no doubt heard of Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a procedure that strives to reduce waste, errors, and constantly improve quality through the services and deliverables an organization produces. Six Sigma was developed by some really smart people at Motorola who received the Malcolm National Quality Award in 1988 for their Six Sigma methodology. Most software is created and tested, then the errors are fixed, patched, or ignored, and then the entire process starts over. Software development, for the most part, focuses on inspection to ensure quality; this is quality control. Six Sigma, however, focuses on preventing the mistakes from entering the process at all; this is quality assurance. The Six Sigma program was invented by the smart folks at Motorola during the 1980s. Their creation paid off with an increase in profits, customer satisfaction, and quality awards. Their program went on to be adapted as a standard for quality assurance by the American Society of Quality (ASQ). Visit ASQ at www.asq.org. Figure 6-2 shows the range of possibilities for sigma. According to ASQ, most organizations perform at three to four sigma, where they drop anywhere between 20 and 30 percent of their revenue due to a lack of quality. If a company can perform at Six Sigma, it only allows 3.4 defects per million opportunities.
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