202 Part II: Planning (Web hosting top) Your Software Project
202 Part II: Planning Your Software Project The multiple views, searches, and tools increased the developers work time, which also drove costs up. Bonuses for the project team are based on the budget for the project. As the project s budget grew, so did the bonuses for the pro- ject team. However, team members became frustrated that they had to change their work throughout the project, so the loss of morale likely affected project performance. Marti and Thomas agreed that the changes to the project scope were value-added changes, but the changes value may be marginal. Track- ing the impact of the project benefits after the deliverable moves into production is the only method to analyze the true cost-effectiveness of the changes and their profitability for the organization. (continued) Conducting variance analysis Any time you experience differences between what was planned and what was experienced, you have a variance. Variance analysis enables you to complete root cause analysis. Your goal is to find out why the actual project costs are differing from your estimates so that you can stop the bleeding. You can even correct the overruns if you re good at root cause analysis. We cover variance analysis and root cause analysis in Chapter 14. When you track and measure, you have opportunities to react. For example, if Bob is slipping on his assignments, but Jan is way ahead, you can balance the load by giving some of Bob s work to Jan. Your root cause analysis may tell you that Bob s not confident in this area of the project work, or that he s on seven other projects, or that his time estimates were over-optimistic. Whatever the reason, you can now react and make process changes to correct the problem. Software project management tools, such as Microsoft Project, can help you determine where activities are slipping, complete trend analyses, and simulate what may happen if project costs continue to mushroom. The goal, of course, is to make corrective actions to get the project back on financial track and to prevent similar mistakes from entering the project again. Having More Project than Cash Ready for some bad news? Sometimes there s nothing you can do when it comes to your project being overbudget. Sometimes all your planning, hard work, efforts to control costs, attempts to keep changes at bay, and efforts to keep your project team on track all go down the drain. Whatever the reason your project has begun to rival the budget for the movie Waterworld (we hope the product isn t quite as bad), you re stuck between a failing project and a hard place. You ve got to fix this thing.
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