Project Management



Project Management

Initiating the Project

This paper explores the concept of project management in a holistic context.the project is about upgrading the Fiction Corporation network and correct any security flaws in its infrastructure as part of this move. The company wishes a seamless migration that minimizes impact to its customers and employees. Therefore this project aims at building a secured effective network system for Fiction Corporation. This network migration plan will be in accordance to the PMBOK® process areas and will use standard project management software to manage the budget and associated tasks. Key to the success of this plan is adherence to the scope, time, and cost baseline.

Generally, project management is distinguished from the general management of corporations by the mission-oriented nature of a project. A project organization will generally be terminated when the mission is accomplished. According to the Project Management Institute, the discipline of project management can be defined as follows:

''Project management is the art of directing and coordinating human and material resources throughout the life of a project by using modern management techniques to achieve predetermined objectives of scope, cost, time, quality and participation satisfaction''(Kerzner, 2009).

By contrast, the general management of business and industrial corporations assumes a broader outlook with greater continuity of operations. Nevertheless, there are sufficient similarities as well as differences between the two so that modern management techniques developed for general management may be adapted for project management.

The basic ingredients for a project management framework may be represented schematically in Figure -1. A working knowledge of general management and familiarity with the special knowledge domain related to the project are indispensable. Supporting disciplines such as computer science and decision science may also play an important role. The representation in Figure -1 reflects only the sources from which the project management framework evolves.

Figure 1:  Basic Ingredients in Project Management

Project Plan

These days, the cost of the project is often fixed before the design is done, and sometimes even before design has begun. Estimation now becomes more of guesswork based upon experience that was gained by screwing up earlier estimates. Without the design, it was quite impossible to know how many lines of code/functions/components/objects would be required. The estimator should rely on data and documents available before one starts the design, such as the functional and non-functional requirements, workflows, and use-cases. Therefore, requirements gathering and analysis is very critical to the project's estimation (design, development, and testing).

Using these documents, the estimator may create an object hierarchy tree simultaneously. The object hierarchy tree can help identify different levels/types of objects to be created, what is expected from these objects, and even some attributes for the objects. Therefore, without having an application design in place, the scope of work to be done, in terms of functionality required, can be identified.

Development Costs - Personnel

Next, we need to determine the output of a typical team member. Some companies prefer to segregate team members depending upon the role, position, and pay scale of the team ...