PROGRAMME MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

Programme Management Practices

Programme Management Practices

Programme Management

Programme management is about managing groups of projects to achieve a desired outcome or benefit for an organisation. It is about the structuring and control of those projects so they deliver effectively as a group(Aaron, 2009). Programs connect a company's strategic plans to the projects necessary to implement them. Programs frequently span many years, include multiple product releases, involve numerous and diverse stakeholder groups, and necessitate the establishment of a program office. This course covers the history, current practice, and future directions of program management.

Major Programmes and new management tools for planning

The purpose of project planning is to identify the scope of the project, estimate the work involved, and create a project schedule. Project planning begins with requirements that define the software to be developed. The project plan is then developed to describe the tasks that will lead to completion(Aaron, 2009).

The purpose of project monitoring and control is to keep the team and management up to date on the project's progress. If the project deviates from the plan, then the project manager can take action to correct the problem. Project monitoring and control involves status meetings to gather status from the team. When changes need to be made, change control is used to keep the products up to date(Aaron, 2009).

As a subdiscipline of project management, some regard the management of software development akin to the management of manufacturing, which can be performed by someone with management skills, but no programming skills. John C. Reynolds rebuts this view, and argues that software development is entirely design work, and compares a manager who cannot program to the managing editor of a newspaper who cannot write.

A software development process is concerned primarily with the production aspect of software development, as opposed to the technical aspect. These processes exist primarily for supporting the management of software development, and are generally skewed toward addressing business concerns(Aaron, 2009).

Requirements analysis is a term used to describe all the tasks that go into the instigation, scoping and definition of a new or altered computer system. Requirements analysis is an important part of the software engineering process; whereby business analysts or software developers identify the needs or requirements of a client; having identified these requirements they are then in a position to design a solution.

Software project management encompasses the knowledge, techniques, and tools necessary to manage the development of software products. This curriculum module discusses material that managers need to create a plan for software development, using effective estimation of size and effort, and to execute that plan with attention to productivity and quality.

A project schedule represents a commitment by the team to perform a set of tasks. When the project manager adds a task to the schedule and it's agreed upon by the team, the person who is assigned to that task now has a commitment to complete it by the task's due date. Senior managers feel that they can depend on the schedule as an accurate forecast of ...