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212 Part III: Executing Your Software Project Plan authorizing the project work as part of the WAS; it may be your client, your sponsor, or a particular governing body within the organization. Creating a work authorization system Your organization probably has a pretty standard method for authorizing software project work, so you should refer to its outline for the exact procedure. The WAS is simply a document that includes information on Project tasks that need to be completed Sequence for completing required tasks Documents and/or deliverables that need to be developed Methods of tracking project progress Required approvals for authorizing work Project start date Project end date Required resources Special considerations The work authorization system should be completed before a project begins and it may also be completed before the future phases of a project begin. When one phase of the project ends, your organization may have a phase-end review so that they can close the current phase of the project before starting the next phase. Such systems are sometimes called phase gates. During this process, the appropriate stakeholders for your organization authorize the next phase of the project. Using a project management information system A project management information system (PMIS) is a set of automated tools that enable you and your project team to gather information, develop and track the project plan, and keep track of the status of your software project and communicate that information to the appropriate stakeholders. These can be homegrown systems, off-the-shelf systems, or enterprise-wide systems. PMIS enables you to: Track resources to find out whether team members are available, overextended, and on track with their deadlines.
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Chapter 10 Working the Project Plan In This Chapter Appreciating the usefulness and limitations of project management information systems Understanding quality management planning Dabbling in quality management theories Managing software project risks Exploring the risk management plan Identifying information gathering techniques Documenting your effectiveness Do you want to create software project plans that other project managers talk about for years to come? Do you want to be the envy of your peers as they gaze longingly at your quality management plans and slobber all over your risk management plans? To be the talk of the software project management community, all you need is to perform the proper planning, use the appropriate tools and techniques, and figure out how to make the most of what others have already done. If you re proactive in your software project management efforts, your project plans will be a success. In this chapter, we show you all the types of plans you must deal with and show you how to use them. Authorizing the Project Work You should have your work authorized before you ever start working on your software project. After all, no one wants to take a chance on working on a software project or any project for that matter that was never authorized. Your project is officially and formally authorized as a part of the project charter, which we discuss in Chapters 1 and 2. A work authorization system (WAS), one of the inputs to the project charter, is a tool that authorizes the work activities that need to be completed to ensure the success of your software project. Your organization defines who is responsible for
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In this part . . . Part III shows you how to put your hard work and impressive planning into action. You ve created your project plans now execute them. Discover how you can develop your team, and find out how to best manage conflicts. In this part, you also figure out the various types of vendor contracts and discover how to execute your quality management and risk management plans.
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Part III Executing Your Software Project Plan
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208 Part II: Planning Your Software Project your estimates. The variance report, sometimes called an exceptions report, details the cause of the cost. Get to work on this report at the first hint of a problem. Do not wait until you have completely run out of cash! Dealing with a Budget Problem that Your Bosses Know about (But Haven t Addressed) Your project is out of money and you need more funds to complete the work. You ve completed variance reports, so management knows what s what, but your bosses haven t exactly jumped at the opportunity to pour more funds into your project. When things get to that hysterical point, call a civilized meeting with management (bring all your documentation) so they are forced to examine the variance reports to determine whether the same problems have recurred throughout the project or whether new problems, risks, and other cost-eating monsters have crept into the execution. Before you enter this meeting, prioritize the major problems that have consumed the project budget so that you can identify the cause of the problem and who may need to help pay for completing the project scope. For example, if one of the project stakeholders failed to provide accurate requirements, then your project team may have built the software according to the supplied requirements. The stakeholder then may reject the software because, while it matches their supplied requirements, it s not what they actually wanted. Just be very careful to never walk into a meeting with the intent of placing blame or escaping blame. Take ownership and accept accountability when something goes awry. For example, if a stakeholder failed to provide accurate requirements, what did you do to alleviate that situation? While this scenario is all too common, the stakeholder should bear some of the blame. But so should the project manager. One of your key activities is to communicate with, not to, the stakeholders regarding their requirements. It s easier, and more cost effective, to spend more time ensuring the accuracy of the requirements before your team builds a piece of software the stakeholder doesn t want. After you and management have identified the cost problems, the stakeholders have to evaluate the overall worth of the project and determine what to do next. If the project is worthy, far enough along in the project deliverable, and you ve done a good job of explaining the cost overruns and how you will react to them in the future, then you can probably expect to continue working on the project with more funds.
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Chapter 9: Building Your Project Budget 207 Tactfully remind management or the customers why the project was initiated. This may help steer additional funds to your project. If the project was worth initiating, then it s likely worth continuing. Recognizing Budgetary Problems Before You Get to the Root Cause Analysis Stage It should never be a huge surprise to you, your bosses, the stakeholders, your clients, or even your project team that your project budget is suddenly gone. The words surprise and suddenly shouldn t even be used in the same sentence as the word budget. As the project moves through phases, milestones, and even deliverables, you should easily be able to track expenses against the amount of work you ve completed for the dollars spent. Figure 9-5 shows a cost baseline project that s in month four of eight months. The solid line represents the project s cost estimate while the dashed line represents the actual costs of the project to date. The difference between what was estimated and what is being experienced is the variance. If this project continues on the same path, the project costs will likely continue to mushroom and move farther and farther away from the original estimates. Figure 9-5: A variance is the difference between the estimate and the actual costs. Actual costs EstimateCosts Variance Schedule When costs exceed the estimates, you ll likely have to do a variance report for management so that you can explain why the actual costs aren t in line with
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206 Part II: Planning Your Software Project Figure 9-4: Kill points are oppor tunities to stop the project. Live with deliverable for the short term and then move the project into versioning. Live with the deliverable as it is because there s no more cash available to sink into the project. Trimming the project scope can be a great solution (okay, it s not great, but it is acceptable sometimes) for projects that have never been attempted before. Projects with undertakings that have no historical information, no point of reference, and no expert judgment to rely on are projects that are just begging to run over on cost. By reducing the scope, you re able to create a deliverable and not go wildly over on cost overruns. This approach, as Figure 9-4 illustrates, is most feasible if you have incorporated kill points into your project. A kill point is a point during the project where the project is slated for review. The idea is that management reviews the overall success of your project up to a certain deliverable. If your project is doing well, congrats! You get to advance to the next phase of your project. If your project is not doing so hot, then your project is cancelled or postponed. Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Kill points Begging for cash If trimming the project scope is not an option (and often it s not), then your option is limited to asking for more cash to complete the project. Typically, it s easier to get more time than money, but because you re usually buying the developers time to complete the project work, time and money are tied together. When you re forced into this scenario, you really need all the facts about what has gone wrong and why. Most importantly, you need to be able to determine how you ll avoid making the same mistakes again. You can use your lessons learned document and your root cause analysis as tools to show what has caused the problem and how you ll prevent the problem from happening again. No one, especially management, wants to infuse your project budget with more dollars only to see the problem reappear over and over.
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Chapter 9: Building Your Project Budget 205 Figure 9-3: The Iron Triangle must remain in balance for project success. Reducing the project scope After you identify the cause of the project failure, one of the first options you can recommend is to reduce the project scope. This option may be a tough sell (and difficult to accomplish) because the client has already approved the deliverable. Reducing the project scope may not be an option if you have contractual obligations. The Iron Triangle, which we discuss in Chapters 2 and 3, requires that all three side of the triangle (cost, time, and scope) remain equal for the project to be successful. Figure 9-3 shows what your Iron Triangle probably looks like at this point of your project. Notice that the line for the scope is much longer than the lines for time and cost. You can lop off parts of the project scope to be closer to the budget you ve been allotted. This will allow you and the stakeholders to have a deliverable and to still be close to the original budget. Another option is to add to the cost part of the triangle or the schedule portion. Scope The problem with trimming the project scope is that it s not always feasible. Chopping the scope leaves you with less of a deliverable, especially if the causes of the budget overrun are related to errors, rework, and rejections from testing. But if the project team does have a deliverable or at least part of the deliverable it may be enough to move the project into production with a bit more work. And what of the remaining scope? You ve got options: Live with the deliverable as it is if the project is a low priority and not expected to make much money. Of course, this may not be an option in every scenario. Live with the deliverable as it is if the software is a stop-gap tool. CostTime
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204 Part II: Planning Your Software Project Inadequate scope definition Performance issues during testing Risks and threats that have affected the project Causal factor charting Causal factor charting, as explained in Chapter 14, is a flowchart of activity sequences leading up to an identified issue and identified circumstances that affected the problem. This process is about more than finding a single, major blunder. You need to identify all the circumstances that led to the problem: competency levels, communication breakdown, lack of testing, and so on. You begin causal factor charting in tandem with your data collection. It helps you and the project team identify the problems and how the problems have caused the project budget to be consumed faster than what was anticipated. Identifying the root cause Now that you and the project team have completed the causal factor charting, you need to identify why each causal factor existed. The answer to the question Why did this problem happen? tells you the root cause and where the project began to erode. Yes, you have to do root cause identification with every single causal factor you ve identified, and no, this is not an easy process. The point of the process, however, is to identify where the problems started, what trends may be running through your project, and how you ll prevent the problems from recurring. (Of course, you may also identify some positive trends in your project and use them to your advantage in the problem resolution stage of this process.) Reacting to the causes What good is root cause analysis if there is no response? You must react to the causes in the project or your project is bound to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Not addressing issues can cause your project to go deeper and deeper into the red. The outcome of root cause analysis will help you, and management, determine what the best route for your project is. And that s what the rest of this chapter is all about. You cannot, must not, go to management with a problem unless you can clearly identify the problem. And then, of course, you must propose a solution. If your problem is simply I m out of cash, and your solution is, Gimme some more money, you re setting yourself up for failure, dismissal, or, at the very least, a shake in management s confidence in your abilities. You may identify some surprising positive trends (Lucy is always ahead of schedule and her work is always perfect; your team has really picked up the slack since Ralph was out sick; or Mary is chronically overworked, but Jon isn t) that can help you toward a solution.
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Chapter 9: Building Your Project Budget 203 The first thing you need to do is sit down and revisit your plan so that you can consider your options. Yes, you do have options. Completing root cause analysis Before you pull your hair out or quit your job to run a dental floss farm, do some root cause analysis of the problem or problems. Chances are, you probably have a hint as to the cause of your budgetary crisis. These things rarely crop up suddenly, but fester for a while. Root cause analysis enables you to map out problems so that you can respond. We cover this thoroughly in Chapter 14. Just to be crystal clear, root causes are problems that you, the project manager, can control. Weather, for example, is not a root cause because you don t have control over the weather. You don t need any fancy software to complete a root cause analysis. You just need to work with your team and the appropriate stakeholders to list the problem and all possible causes. But remember, time is money. Balance the amount of time you spend on root cause analysis with the time you will be away from the project. Obviously, for you and your team to spend an exorbitant amount of time away from the project determining cause without also using that time to come up with a plan to address the root cause is a little on the counterproductive side. Here s what you should accomplish with root cause analysis: Identify what has happened, how it has happened, and why it was allowed to happen to prevent the problem from happening again Identify specific underlying causes and their effects so you can put steps into place that will improve overall performance Chart the causes and contributing causes through trends, data collection, and project analysis Facilitate a conversation on root cause identification to lead to a solution and to prevent the problem from recurring Collecting data Your first step in root cause analysis is to collect the data that contributed to the problem. This process is the largest part of root cause analysis. Here are some common themes in software projects that you ll want to consider in your analysis: Time delays Rework Inaccurate time estimates
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