SW Project Management
Project Communication and QA
INFO 420
Dr. Jennifer Booker
INFO 420
Chapters 9 & 10
1
Need for communication

As we’ve seen, IT projects tend to be
volatile, so good lines of communication
are needed to keep everyone updated
 Else
you implement unneeded functionality,
work to outdated specs or designs, etc.
 How well is the plan being followed?
 How do we make good adjustments?
INFO 420
Chapters 9 & 10
2
Need for communication

Lack of communication is a major cause
of IT project failure
 28%
of a CompTIA survey said poor
communication was the #1 reason for failure
 18% cited insufficient resource planning
 13% unrealistic deadlines
 Could communication affect the latter two?
INFO 420
Chapters 9 & 10
3
Communication includes

Communication planning
 How
will information and knowledge
be stored?
 Who gets what information when?
 Who can access what information?
 Who updates information?
 What forms of communication are used?
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Chapters 9 & 10
4
Communication includes

Information distribution
 Get
the right info to the right people at
the right time in the right format

Performance reporting
 Includes

communication with stakeholders
Managing stakeholders
 Keep
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info needs and issues met
Chapters 9 & 10
5
Communication needs

A project communication plan can include
what information goes to each stakeholder
and how that information is delivered
methods – reports, reviews, meetings
 Informal methods – email, conversations
 Formal

What does each stakeholder want and
need to know about the project?
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Chapters 9 & 10
6
Communication needs
 Not
everyone should see detailed financial
data, technical choices and decisions, etc.
 Many more might want a broad overview of
progress to date, projected project completion
(budget, schedule)

No one likes surprises
 Can
reflect poorly on management if
unprepared (FEMA, New Orleans)
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Chapters 9 & 10
7
Monitor and control project

Events during a project could result in
sudden changes in productivity, focus
 Need
a process for making changes to project
schedule, scope, budget to accommodate
the unexpected

Don’t pretend to be on track if you’re not!
 Honesty
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up front is often the best approach
Chapters 9 & 10
8
Monitor and control project

Key management choices often include
 Reassign
resources
 Adjust the plan – scope, schedule,
budget, quality

So need an early warning system to
identify problems as soon as possible
 Hence
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obsessive comparison ‘plan vs actuals’
Chapters 9 & 10
9
Monitor and control project

Part of this process is measuring
performance, which also helps hold
people accountable
 Side
benefit to see if resources are being
utilized effectively

Controls can be within project, or external
(e.g. government or industry standards)
INFO 420
Chapters 9 & 10
10
Communications plan

The project communications plan can be
informal or formal, depending on the size
and nature of the project
 Key
is to keep stakeholders informed
 Even (especially?) those who oppose or
don’t support the project!

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Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer!
Chapters 9 & 10
11
Communications plan contents
A communications plan can be fairly
simple, depending on project complexity
 Identify all the stakeholders; for each

 What

kinds of information do they need?
Consider technical and project information, and
what level of detail is appropriate
 How
often? Daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly?
 Discuss the reasons or rationale
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Chapters 9 & 10
12
Communications plan contents

Consider whether some kinds of reports
can be made general enough to meet the
needs of several stakeholders
 Or

is it better to customize content for each?
Information might include the usual
suspects
 Scope,
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budget, schedule, quality, risk
Chapters 9 & 10
13
Communications plan contents

Consider also who should get specific
deliverables from the project
 Phase
reports, design reviews, release
descriptions, test reports, etc. – who gets
them? Why?

What medium or format will
communication take?
 Tweets,
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PDF, email, meetings, telecons, etc.
Chapters 9 & 10
14
Communications plan contents

Timing of information varies in importance
 Some
stakeholders are key decision makers,
others might have only casual or passing
interest in project status (vendors, end users)
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Chapters 9 & 10
15
Project metrics

What you measure focuses people’s
attention
 How
would you respond differently if the
course grade was 90% participation?

Here we want to measure the basics
 Scope,
schedule, budget, resources,
quality, risk
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Chapters 9 & 10
16
Project metrics

A good metric should be
 Understandable
 Quantifiable
 Cost
effective to collect
 Proven effective
 High impact - meaningful
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Chapters 9 & 10
17
Project metrics

Guidelines for a measurement system
 Measurement
system should allow project
team to measure progress
 Team should design their own
measurement system
 Adopt only a few measures (avoid overload)
 Measures should track results and progress
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Chapters 9 & 10
18
Earned Value

Earned Value balances cost, schedule,
and the amount of work accomplished
(the “earned value”) during a project
 Each
task’s planned cost is called the
planned value (PV) of that task
 This assumes you’ve planned out all the
project tasks from the start!
INFO 420
Chapters 9 & 10
19
Earned Value

The planned completion of the project is
the budget at completion (BAC), both time
and money
 So
the BAC is the end of the PV curve
The actual expenditures at any point in
time is the actual cost (AC)
 The earned value (EV) is the planned
value of tasks you’ve actually finished

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Chapters 9 & 10
20
Earned Value
This lets us separate how much has been
spent from what really got accomplished
 Define

variance (CV, $) = EV – AC
 Schedule variance (SV, $) = EV – PV
 Cost performance index (CPI) = EV/AC
 Schedule performance index (SPI) = EV/PV
 Cost
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Chapters 9 & 10
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Earned Value

For historic note
 AC
was called ACWP (actual cost of work
performed)
 PV was called BCWS (budgeted cost of work
scheduled)
 EV was called BCWP (budgeted cost of work
performed)

Many sources will use this terminology
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Chapters 9 & 10
22
Earned Value

The best trick is that we can predict when
the project will finish, the Estimate At
Completion (EAC)
 EAC(cost)
= BAC(cost) / CPI
 EAC(schedule) = BAC(schedule) / SPI

These assume we’re using a long term
trend for CPI and SPI
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Chapters 9 & 10
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Earned Value

There are many other EV metrics
https://www.goldpractices.com/practices/tev/index.php
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Chapters 9 & 10
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Earned Value
The value assigned to each task can be
handled in many ways
 Common ways are

 Give
½ of EV at start of task, the other ½
when completed (50/50), or give full EV only
when task is completed (0/100)
 Assign some ‘percent complete’ to task

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Watch for subjective assessments!
Chapters 9 & 10
25
Reporting performance

Project reporting tends to fall into
categories
 Reviews,
focusing on specific deliverables,
milestones, or project phases

Review work accomplished, address issues,
get approval to move on
 Status

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reporting
Compare actuals to plan, reasons for variances
Chapters 9 & 10
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Reporting performance

Progress reporting
 Review

accomplishments, compare to plans
Forecast reporting
 Predict
future status of project (cost,
schedule)
 Might use trend analysis
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Chapters 9 & 10
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Information distribution

Again, consider how information will
be distributed
 Face
to face meetings
 Telephone, email, other electronic devices
 Collaboration technology (NetMeeting,
Blackboard, wikis, etc.)
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Chapters 9 & 10
28
IT Project Quality
Management
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Chapters 9 & 10
29
Quality?
What is quality?
 If something has quality, how can you tell?

Are features and quality connected?
 Who defines what quality is for a product?

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Chapters 9 & 10
30
Quality

Often in a business context, ‘fitness for
use’ or ‘conformance to requirements’ are
key elements of a quality product
 In

short, it does what it’s supposed to do
Is that enough?
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Chapters 9 & 10
31
Quality management processes

Project quality management (PQM)
processes (per the usual PMBOK) include
 Quality

planning
What standards need to be met, and how?
assurance – compare project
performance against those standards
 Quality control – ensure product quality
 Quality

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Support defect prevention & process improvement
Chapters 9 & 10
32
Quality scope

Hence quality management includes both
looking out for product quality (the system
being created or maintained) as well as
process quality (are you following good
practices?)
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Chapters 9 & 10
33
Quality costs

Good quality often pays for itself in the
long run
 Avoids
defects, rework, bad publicity, etc.
 DIA/DEN airport baggage system quality
issues cost $1M per day in lost revenue
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Chapters 9 & 10
34
Quality tools and approaches

The scientific management approach was
developed by Frederic Taylor
 Studied
the relationship between people and
tasks, to improve the efficiency of each task
and subtask by reducing variability in how
they were performed, just do essential actions
 Also did time-motion studies
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Chapters 9 & 10
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Control charts

Walter Shewhart gave us control charts
 Provide
a more scientific and objective basis
for understanding variability
 Plots the mean, upper and lower control limits
(+/- 3s from the mean)
 Normal random variation is due to common
causes, want to eliminate assignable causes
 The basis for statistical process control
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Chapters 9 & 10
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Total Quality Movement

W Edwards Deming is legendary in quality
management circles
 Empowered
workers to contribute to quality
 Worked with Shewhart
 First taught Japanese managers, later the US
caught on
 Famous for 14 points of quality
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Chapters 9 & 10
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Quality planning, improvement

Joseph Juran gave us the ‘fitness for use’
definition of quality
 Quality
is not an accident, it must be planned
 Recognize internal and external customers
 The quality trilogy – quality planning, control,
and improvement – make a Quality Planning
Road Map
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Chapters 9 & 10
38
Quality diagrams & graphs

Kaoru Ishikawa, a Deming pupil, gave us
ways to present quality data
 Gave
us the fishbone diagram, one of
Ishikawa’s seven basic quality tools
Alfred Pareto gave us his diagram
 And process flow charts are also helpful

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Chapters 9 & 10
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Quality standards
 ISO
9000
 CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration)
 Six Sigma

Awards
 Malcolm
Baldrige National Quality Award
 Deming Prize
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Chapters 9 & 10
40
Quality systems

ISO 9000 is the best known quality
management system
 Also
includes ISO 9001 and 9004 stds
 Facility-based
 Originally for manufacturing, now very broad
 Certification checks about every six months
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Chapters 9 & 10
41
Quality systems

CMMI is based on the CMM developed in
the 1980’s by the Software Engineering
Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
 Original
goal was to fix the software
development crisis
 Led to similar structures for systems
engineering, software acquisition, personnel
management, and other areas
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Chapters 9 & 10
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CMMI

Led to hard time choosing the ‘right’ CMM
for a given project
 So
now instead, CMMI has “simplified” the
problem to three sets of models
 CMM/CMMI has five levels of process
maturity

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Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed, Optimizing
Chapters 9 & 10
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CMMI

Within each level (after level 1) there are
Key Process Areas – to meet goals
 Level
2 includes CM, QA, project tracking &
oversight, project planning, and req’ts mgmt
 Level 4 adds statistical process control for
key processes
 Level 5 adds defect prevention and
continuous process improvement
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Chapters 9 & 10
44
Quality systems

Six Sigma was created by Motorola
 Based
on fanatical process control
 Aims for under 3.4 defects per million
opportunities
 Known for green and black belts
 Source of DMAIC improvement framework

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Define goals, measure, analyze, improve, control
Chapters 9 & 10
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Quality planning

All of these standards agree that
 Focus
on customer satisfaction is essential
 Quality is by prevention, not inspection
 Improve the process to improve the product
 Quality is everyone’s job
 Fact-based management is critical (which
points to measurement)
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Chapters 9 & 10
46
Quality planning

So how does all this apply to a project?
 Need
to choose an approach for PQM
 Which standard(s) are best to follow, if any?

Again, we’re driven by the project MOV
 That
defines the project scope and req’ts
 So we need project and quality standards that
will ensure we meet those requirements
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Chapters 9 & 10
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Metrics
We looked at ways to present quality data
 How choose what to measure?

 Map
to project goals, e.g. using GQ(I)M
 Define product, process, resource, and/or tool
metrics that are appropriate for your MOV
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Chapters 9 & 10
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V&V

Verification and Validation (V&V) are key
aspects, often associated with testing
 Verification
makes sure the product meets its
requirements

Often done via reviews, walk-throughs, inspections
 Validation
makes sure the product meets the
expectations and needs of the customer

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Customer testing, a and b tests
Chapters 9 & 10
49
Change control

Change control becomes necessary when
the team has two or more people in it
 Prevents
two+ people editing the same thing
 Allows you to roll back to a previous version
of the system if the new one bites
 Supports good backup strategies
 Defines the final version of the system
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Chapters 9 & 10
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Configuration Management
Change control is one part of an overall
Configuration Management (CM) strategy
 CM includes

 Configuration

What items are under CM control?
 Configuration

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identification
control
Includes change control processes and tools
Chapters 9 & 10
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Configuration Management
 Configuration

Audits
Do you really have what you think you have?
 Configuration
Status Reports
Ability to produce reports from the change control
system, e.g. the current system configuration,
change history for a particular item, etc.
 Change history might cover various versions
(Win XP to Vista), revisions (minor updates), or
variations (different sites)

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Chapters 9 & 10
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Quality control

A key general job of QM is to monitor the
project’s compliance with its claimed
standards
 Should
be ongoing throughout the project
 Assess processes as well as work products
 Produce reports on each assessment
 Collect metrics on project status
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Chapters 9 & 10
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Keep learning

QM processes support the overall learning
environment of the project and its parent
organization
 So
as usual, document lessons learned from
QM activities, and share them with other
projects
 Continual improvements and experiments
with novel processes can be invaluable
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Chapters 9 & 10
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