Project management Panagiotis Dimitrios .Pilichos

Panagiotis-Dimitrios Pilichos
ΤΕΙ ΠΕΙΡΑΙΑ
Faculty of Computing, Information Systems & Mathematics
MSc in INFORMATION SYSTEMS
MSc in ELECTRONIC COMMERCE
Module: Projects & Risk Management (CIM302)
Dates: 19th March- 25th May 2007
Module Co-ordinator:
Mr. M. Kontesis
SOFTWARE PROJECT/CASE STUDY
Student name: Panagiotis-Dimitrios Pilichos

Table of Contents
Project Management Coordination ................................................................................3
Controlling the Project...................................................................................................8
Risk Management ........................................................................................................12
References....................................................................................................................15

Project Management Coordination
Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to
project activities in order to meet, or exceed, stakeholder needs and expectations from
a project (Kerzner, 1992), In addition, it is commonly stated that project management
is the planning, organizing, directing, and controlling of the resources fore a relatively
short-term objective that has been established to complete specific goals and
objectives. Project management uses the systems approach to management by having
functional personnel, that is, a vertical hierarchy assigned to each specific project
within a horizontal hierarchy (Pinto, J. & Slevin, 1988).
Project success is often assesses using internal measures such as meeting schedule and
budget requirements and achieving performance objectives. These characteristics are
seen as being relatively easy to measure and within the real of the organization.
Freeman and Beale (1992) concluded that project sponsors are predominantly
concerned with meeting the triple targets of technical performance, cost, and duration.
The project of our company has to focus on the following areas, so that to be
successful.
Scope Management
Scope management takes a look at the big picture view of projects. It is mostly
concerned with broad issues as developing a scope statement, constructing work
breakdown structures, understanding what happens in the different stages of a
project’s life cycle, selecting a project, establishing a project charter, and managing
change in projects.
Time Management
Time management centers on scheduling projects. It involves techniques such as
developing Gantt charts, milestones charts, program evaluation and review techniques
charts, critical path method charts, and earned – value techniques.

Cost Management
Cost management focuses on cost estimating, basic budgeting, life cycle costing,
principles of business economics, capital budgeting and cost control.
Human Resource Management
The primary human resource concerns in project management are directed at
managing conflict, motivating borrowed resources, managing in a matrix
environment, building authority, coping with project politics, and employing human
resources effectively and efficiently.
Quality Management
Quality management is directed at producing goods and services to maximize
customer satisfaction. Specific quality management competencies include quality
control, the zero-defects concepts, the difference between random and assigned
variance, the use of diagrams to identify the major sources of problems, and sampling.
Procurement Management
Procurement management involves the basic issues of outsourcing and purchasing.
Project managers must understand such principles as fixed-fee contracts, cost-plus-
award-fee contracts, cost-plus-incentive-fee contracts, and time-and-materials
contracts. They should also have knowledge of requests for proposals and statements
of work.
Communications Management
Communications management is the most difficult to quantify, yet in fact, is the key
to success in any project. Project managers must have a basic understanding of
communications models and an appreciation for various approaches to
communication. Various meetings (such as kickoff meetings, status reviews,
monitoring reviews, technical reviews and crisis meetings) are all vital for the positive
exchange of information. Due to the global nature of many organizations today, the
ability to conduct virtual meetings via teleconference and conference calls has
become critically important.

Project Team’s Members
Also, the project manager has to focus on team member participation and their skills.
To ensure a successful multifunctional team, it is important to understand the
characteristics of team members. The main characteristics of team members that
contribute to a successful multifunctional team are: functional expertise, teamwork
experience, communication skills, flexibility in job assignment, and personality traits.
To assign the right team members to the right tasks, a thorough analysis has to be
made.
Prasad (1996) illustrates three different types of team formation based on the required
skill sets: 1) Multidisciplinary team: Means it requires a number of teams or team
members who specialize in different aspects of product development. 2)
Interdisciplinary team: Means the team possesses some portion of a skill set (partial
knowledge) belonging to two or more multidisciplinary areas that are needed for the
product development. 3) Cross disciplinary team: Means one team has profound
knowledge of what the other teams (mu1tidisciplinary or interdisciplinary teams) do.
For our company we propose the first type of team, as we need a variety of
specialized skills. Multifunctional teams provide a mechanism for bringing together
people with different but complementary skills and tying them to designing and
manufacturing software products. However, as our project’s product is complex, so
does the process or designing it. Teams that develop such increasingly complex
product are becoming larger and more complex themselves. This will inevitably
degrade team performance when team size becomes too large. That’s why the project
manager has to focus on team size, as well.
Team Size
Within any team organization, team members have a strong influence on each other.
Interactions and responses among team members have a large effect on the success of
product deve1opment. It has been suggested that software product development teams
are more successful if their members are able to fully communicate with each other
(Griffin and Hauser 1992). Furthermore, communication in a development project is
related to the number of communication links among the project team members.
Therefore, effective and efficient communication will be very difficult to obtain as the

team size becomes larger. Many researchers have suggested that the smaller the
organization, the more success there is in getting teams up and running (Mckee 1992).
As the team size increases, so does the diversity of a multifunctional team.
Eventually, when the team size continues to increase, the complexity of the
information flows among team members will extend significantly. Hoedemaker et al
(1995) concluded that there exist limits for both the size and the number of modules
in a software project. The more modules the more time will be spent on
communication among the teams. It has been reported that to be an effective and
successful modern firm, small teams need to be used for an increasing variety of
tasks. It has also been reported that it is better to implement the smallest possible
number of people who can do the task and suggested that increasing team size brings
lower cohesion.
Project Team Member Cohesion
In addition to team size, some key points cannot be overlooked when starting to build
a good multifunctional design team. According to Mckee (1992), three barriers
subject matter barrier, process barrier, and cultural barrier have to be avoided.. These
three barriers prevent product improvement due to a lack of expertise, burden of
information process, and deficiency of adaptation. In addition, there is growing
evidence that team members must possess both individual task skills and teamwork
skills in order to perform together successfully. Therefore, the functional expertise,
teamwork capabilities (teamwork experience, communication skills, and flexibility in
job assignment), arid working relationships among team members are all important
for organizing a successful multifunctional team in which the right team members are
selected. It will be hard to cooperate with employees of another company (Merritron
Robotics) in the first place; therefore an effort has to be made.
Task Decomposition
The design of a complex project usually involves a large number of interrelated tasks
and a ‘wide variety of multifunctional engineers. This can soon become a tangled net
which is too hard for a human designer to manage and organize. To make the design
activity more tractable, managers find it convenient to follow a divide and conquer

strategy (Gebala and Eppinger 1991). In concurrent engineering, the essential
complex problems that arise at the outset of design stage are beyond traditional
solution methods. The increased complexity should be implemented in a way that
does not increase the time of development and manufacturing of a product. A way to
simplify project management is to use decomposition (Kusiak and Wang 1993a). Of
course, Merritron Robotics employees will have to take specific tasks.

Controlling the Project
The formulation of the team is very important, which will be of small size with
experienced members, whose participation will be very active. Our goal is to perform
high team performance. That’s why our team will contain members who (Taylor,
1986):
1) Have the major skills necessary for the task;
2) Are motivated to engage in the task;
3) Have adequate time to devote to the task;
4) Have reasonable aptitude for the task;
5) Will be engaged long enough to provide continuity to the task; and
6) Will join with a small group to allow intensive, task focus interactions.
Another important step for the project to succeed is the delegation of the tasks. First, a
partitioning algorithm is used to rearrange tasks in the original binary DSNI to
identify independent, dependent, and interdependent tasks. Next, in order to provide a
solid foundation for team organization, the partitioned binary DSM is studied in three
aspects: independent, dependent, and interdependent tasks. No further care is needed
for independent tasks that can be done in any order. Dependent tasks can be either
performed sequentially or overlap. A task evolution and sensitivity model (Krishnan
et at 1997) helps decide which strategy (sequential or overlapped) is appropriate AHP
is used to quantify the degrees of evolution and sensitivity of these dependent tasks.
At last, due to the complex interaction of interdependent tasks, binding all the related
interdependent tasks to consider them all at once in a coupling block scents to be a
logical choice. However, task performance will be degraded significantly; as the size
of the coupling block becomes large. The following diagram represents the process.

To further decompose a large task block into smaller ones, AHP and cluster analysis
methods are used. AHP transfers a binary coupling OSM into a numerical coupling
DSM where the degree of dependency between interdependent tasks is disclosed.
Based on these numerical values in the coupling matrix cluster analysis technique has
then to be applied to cluster the large block into smaller blocks in which the
interdependent tasks are tightly related. The framework serves as the foundation for
multifunctional team organization.
The coordination of the tasks has to be undertaken. In general, a design project
consists of n tasks, each assumed to be the simplest and thus cannot be further

divided. The size of n depends on the level of complexity of the design project. The
relationship between every two tasks may be independent, dependent, or
interdependent. Regarding the obtaining, the task evolution ranking using a single
level of AHP involves the following.
• Elements of Comparison: Consecutive dependent tasks in the DSMS
• Criterion: Task evolution (for every pair of tasks compared, which one evolves
faster).
Regarding the Obtaining of the task sensitivity ranking using the single level of AHP
involves the following:
• Elements of Comparison: Consecutive dependent tasks in the DSN
• Criterion: Task sensitivity (for every pair of tasks compared, which one is more
sensitive to its upstream task)
• Task sensitivity ranking vector: The highest value in the ranking vector represents
the most sensitive task to its upstream task. Similar to the task evolution ranking
‘vector, the highest element will serve as the baseline to determine the degrees of
sensitivity for all other tasks in the vector.
Regarding the decision making using task evolution and task sensitivity, it involes the
following
• Overlap tasks: An upstream task with slow evolution and its next downstream task
with low sensitivity.
• Perform tasks sequentially: If the overlapping strategy is not suggested, perform
task(s) sequentially.
• Build multifunctional teams for the overlapped tasks subject to team size constraint
and assign one member to each task that have to function sequentially.
The Gantt diagram including the major tasks that have to be undertaken follows.

Action/ Month
01-15
May 08
16-31
May
08
01-15
June
08
16-30
June
08
1-15
July
08
16-31
July
08
1-15
Aug
ust
08
16-31
Augu
st 08
Project Management Team
Meeting
Project Management Team
Coordination
Research on functions
Design of software and
hardware
Implementation of software
and hardware
Testing of robotic
components
Testing of components’
compatibility
Trial tests
Full production
Delivery of product
Training

Risk Management
One research response to the problem of IT project failure is the software project risk
steam. Gartner (1995) believes that the goal of studying risk detection is to facilitate
identification of risks that may lead to larger problems in the future. He emphasizes
the relationship between effective risk management and increased probabilities in the
success of an IT project.
Our company has to deal with the following risks. First of all, initial scoping suggests
that our Company has the necessary resources for developing the software for this
state-of-the-art work, and Merritron enjoys a good reputation in the development of
the hardware and control applications of bionic and automated production devices,
many of which are already in use world-wide. However, although our Company has
worked successfully with other partners on similar if simpler projects in the past, this
would be the first time with this client, which involves a risk of an ineffective
collaboration. This means, that the members of the project team have to be flexible in
their tactics and their behaviours. They have to make an effort to understand the
culture of the partner and find the most appropriate way of cooperation.
Simultaneously, they have to be very careful at meeting the deadlines, taking into
account that the partners might delay delivering their tasks. This increases the risk, as
the required device does represent a significant advance in robotic capability, which
means that even a bigger effort has to be made.
Another risk that our company has to cope with involves the need of Gateway Oil to
have a fixed price contract, which would include all life-cycle costs, including
scheduled maintenance and. If our company agrees on this, a full long-term and
detailed financial analysis has to be made so that to be sure that the price will
certainly include all the potential future needs for maintenance. This is a great risk,
which has to be transformed to an opportunity to gain money, if the software proves
to be flexible enough and thus not much servicing will be needed.

Another risk involves the capability of the new software to meet the needs of other
customers, as well. The larger the capability the smaller will be the risk. That’s why
the marketing department has to extend its initial research on the potential large
market for such a product and subsequent variants. It has to predict details of the
devices the future potential customers will need and of the proposed operating
environment, so that to customize the product as much as possible beforehand. In this
way the risk will be mitigated.
Another risk involves meeting the deadline, as some of the department managers and
several of our colleagues are doubtful that this project can be designed and produced,
particularly in the time-scales proposed. Others think that it’s not only possible but
also essential to the future of the Company. Thus, our company has to mitigate the
risk. First of all, a thorough analysis of the project team has to be made so that to
conclude if it is possible to implement the project within the given time horizon. If the
conclusion is negative, then extension of the deadline has to be requested. Afterwards,
the project team and the company’s management has to communicate to the
employees the main key points justifying that it is feasible to implement the project
within the restricted timetable. Also, the employees have to fully comprehend the
importance of successfully providing the software. They have to understand, that this
would be the key to our Company's future if it is to remain a recognised market
leader.
Another risk involves losing some of our leading engineers and programmers, unless
a new challenge is found for them. Our company has to protect its main core
competence involving the talented and skilled employees. That’s why specific
motives have to be given to them, so that to retain them. This can be achieved if
employees feel the company as their company, as a company that belongs to them and
contributes to the social benefit. So as to feel a part of the company, they should be
empowered especially in matters related to, what are called, on-the-spot decisions.
The manager has to share the company problems with the key employees and develop
a consensus decision. The form and amount of participation in decision-making as
implied by different types of situations should be clear-cut determined.

Another factor that the project manager has to focus refers to the project team
employees’ relationships. The project manager has to focus on their effective
cooperation with each other within the limits of a team. His personnel’s interest has to
concentrate on the benefit of the whole team (and by extension of the project and the
company) and not on their personal promotion and accomplishments. He should
provide the direction or support or both needed to ensure that the individual goals are
compatible with the overall objectives of the project. Furthermore, he has to learn
skills such as the patience to share information, to trust others, to five up authority,
and to understand when to intervene.

References
 Freeman, M. and Beale, P. (1992). Measuring project success. Project
Management Journal, 23(1), 8-17
 Gartner (1995) Research note: Independent quality reviews: preventing
runaway projects. B.Digrius, GartnerGroup: 2
 Gebala, D.A. and Eppinger, S.D. (1991) Methods for analyzing design
procedures. ASME design theory and methodology. DE-Vol 31: 227-233
 Griffin, A. and Hauser, J.R. (1992) Pattern of communication among
marketing, engineering and manufacturing: A comparison between two new
products. Management Science, 38(3):360-373
 Hoedemaker, G.M., Blackburn, J.D., and van Wassenhove, L.N. (1995) Limits
to Concurrency. Working Paper in INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France
 Kerzner, H. (1992). Project management, a systems approach to planning,
scheduling, and controlling. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
 Krishnan, V., Eppinger, S.D., and Whitney, D.E. (1997) A model-based
framework to overlap product development activities. Management Science.
43:437-451
 McKee, B. (1992). Turn your workers into a team. Nation’s Business, pp.36-
38
 Pinto, J. & Slevin, D. (1988) Project success: Definitions and measurement
techniques. Project Management Journal, 19, 67-72
 Prasad., B. (1996) Concurrent Engineering Fundamentals: Integrated Product
and Process Organization, Prentice Hall International Series, New Jersey, NJ
 Taylor, J.B. (1986) Building an interdisciplinary team. Interdisciplinary
analysis and research, Chubin, D.E. et al. Eds, Lomond, pp. 141-154

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