Express dive into Project Management

According to the well-known definition, the Project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.

Projects result in unique outputs — products, services, and results.

Another difference that helps us to understand that this is a project and not production is GOAL.

The goal is usually a high-level target set by the business and helps to understand why you are starting the project and what you are going to achieve.

Project resources are people, capital, and material or supplies needed for the successful management and completion of a project.

Resource management is how you take those finite resources and organize them so you can successfully steer your project home.

Triple Constraint states that the success of the project is impacted by its budget, deadlines, and features.

All those constraints are linked to each other and you can’t change one without changing the other one.

As a project manager you can trade between these three constraints; however, don’t forget that changing the constraints of one means that the other two will suffer to some extent.

According to the definition provided by the Project management institute, Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.

In reality, it’s a multitasking position where you have to juggle many tasks at the same time.

In the context of project management we’ll talk about 3 groups of stakeholders:

• Sponsors or owners.

• Project team

• End Users, who will interact with a new software directly. User can be internal and external

A project team is a group of professionals who will be responsible for project implementation and delivery. The main goal of the project team is to Implement the project scope, deliver the solution or its part according to the sponsor’s expectations.

In software development, there are technical and non-technical roles in the project team.

Project Management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.

The project manager has to perform both strategic and Routine tasks.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about communication.

For project managers communication takes about 80% of the daily routine. The dictionary definition says that communication is a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior.

As we said, communication takes up most of the project manager's time. There are 5 main ways of communication, each with its own characteristics:

• Chat

• Meeting

• Email

• Call

• Coffee talk

Let's look at each of these ways.

Online communication has become an integral part of everyone's life, especially if you are an IT project manager. You may notice that some people have pleasant communication offline, but their online messages can confuse you. So that The American Express created 6 helpful rules of online Etiquette for making a great virtual impression.

In project management Emails are usually used for business and private correspondence, to Inform about something, provide a report, updates, or to send some documents.

Learn some guidelines for using emails.

The meeting is the most productive time of the day. Of course only if it’s well organized.

Let’s talk about how to organize and facilitate the Kick-off meeting from the Initiation to the follow-up.

The software development life-cycle is a process for creating and delivering the software project. This process includes a few standard steps: planning, analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance.

Let's deal with each of the steps.

The Waterfall model is the most simple and clear model to deliver the software. It was first described back in 1956 as a linear sequence of phases. According to the Waterfall model, the result of each phase is a set of documents or deliverables that are approved.

The next one is the V-model. It is pretty Similar to Waterfall.

V comes from Verification or Validation. The main concept of this model Demonstrates the relationships between each phase of the development life cycle and its associated phase of testing

The next model is a little bit more complex, but more adapted to the reality of software development. It's an Iterative or Incremental model.

The iterative development process is cyclical.

The next Software development life-cycle model is Spiral.

It takes a cue from the Iterative model and its repetition; So the project passes through four phases over and over in a “spiral” until completed, allowing for multiple rounds of refinement.

Now it’s time to talk about the most popular software development model today - The Agile model.

So Agile is ell adapted to the real world changes and accepting Uncertainty.

Big Bang model is pretty popular, used by entrepreneurs who are completely unfamiliar with how software development happens. No planning, best practices, or typical procedures.

The first one that we’ll talk about will be Project Management Body of Knowledge or PMBOK.

It is a Bible of project management all over the world. PMBOK framework from the PMI is often thought of as a traditional project management methodology.

PRINCE2 is a “full-stack” methodology that includes principles, themes, and processes.

Lean methodology is a way of optimizing the people, resources, effort, and energy of your organization toward creating value for the customer. Lean isn’t so much a methodology as it is a philosophy that is from Japan.

Agile methodologies are the most popular in modern software development because this approach is more flexible and adaptive for a fast-changing risky environment.

To start learning agile, you should read an Agile Manifesto, that just turned 20 this year.

According to the latest research in software development, SCRUM is The most popular Agile framework.

So let’s quickly go through the basic principles, processes, and artifacts which a real SCRUM is built from

Kanban is a popular framework used to implement agile.

It can be used in two ways: as a project management framework to organize the whole process of software delivery and as a tool to visualize the ticket flow within a sprint.

Extreme Programming (XP) is an agile software development framework that aims to produce higher quality software, and higher quality of life for the development team.

The software development product team is creating various documents in order to Collect requirements, Find and Visualise the solution, Make a decision or Describe the result. Let's list all basic document types.

The first group of documents is initial documents. Those docs are usually created when the new initiative just starts.

Product Requirement specification or Spec is the Common name of different document templates that are created to collect/specify all project requirements in detail.

Architecture and Design document is created by Solution architects or technical leaders at the beginning of the project when the business analysis is in progress or done.

Let's list and discuss the most common types of technical documentation.

The next type is UX design docs.

User experience design is an important step of software creation.

Product quality is important, so Quality assurance specialists are responsible for Testing documentation.

The last type of project documentation is created when the project is finished and ready to use.

Technical writers, QA engineers, or even product managers sometimes need to write a user Manual doc, User Guide, System administrators, and support staff instructions or FAQs.

Project planning is one of the key activities for project managers. It’s pretty risky to start any initiative without at least a high-level understanding of the project duration, scope, and time that will be spent.

There are many ways in which project managers plan. The planning approach usually depends on the project management lifecycle and methodology your team or company selected for the project. At the highest level, there are three most commonly used approaches to planning: predictive, iterative, and adaptive.

No matter which planning approach you are using, you have to follow a few Planning steps.

Let’s move to the core of planning, discuss how you’ll plan and what you should do.

When the scope is defined, you can make some Prioritization.

The main goal of prioritizing is to define the sequence of work to do.

The next step is Planning resources

The main goal of this step is to define WHO will work and WHAT is needed additionally.

The next is Estimation.

Estimation is the riskiest and uncertain part of planning.

Scheduling is the last and the most exciting planning phase. Having all estimations done, your task is to place all those works on the timeline correctly. The main goal of scheduling is to get some milestone dates and checkpoints and visualize the project path if possible.

The goal of Project execution is pretty simple: your team just needs to take tasks one by one and implement what is described.

Project management software helps managers and team members to collaborate, meet goals on time while managing resources and cost.

I’ll make you a brief overview of the most popular, best developed, and easy-to-use project management apps on a market today.

Let’s talk how to select the best task tracker/PM software for your project.

A ticket or task for developers is an artifact that is usually created, monitored, and controlled by PM.

Task description should contain the issue description and clearly explain to the assigned person what to do.

Every task goes through a sequence of steps before it considered as finished.