Introduction to Project Management

Introduction Concepts Workflow Activities Artifacts Guidelines

Introduction
Purpose
Relation to Other Disciplines
Related Book Content

Introduction

Software Project Management is the art of balancing competing objectives, managing risk, and overcoming constraints to successfully deliver a product which meets the needs of both customers (the payers of bills) and the users. The fact that so few projects are unarguably successful is comment enough on the difficulty of the task.

Purpose

The purpose of Project Management is:

To provide a framework for managing software-intensive projects.
To provide practical guidelines for planning, staffing, executing, and monitoring projects.
To provide a framework for managing risk.

This discipline focuses mainly on the important aspects of an iterative development process:

Risk management
Planning an iterative project, through the lifecycle and for a particular iteration
Monitoring progress of an iterative project, metrics

Relation to Other Disciplines

The Project Management Discipline provides the framework whereby a project is created and managed. In doing so, all other disciplines are utilized as part of the project work:

Requirement discipline
Analysis & Design discipline
Implementation discipline
Test discipline

The Project Management Discipline is one of the supporting process disciplines, together with:

Configuration & Change Management discipline