Project Management and Leadership. Why care about management? 10% of projects were “successful” between 1998 and 2004.

Project Management and Leadership

Why care about management?

• 10% of projects were “successful” between 1998 and 2004

Management vs Leadership

• Management is using tools and techniques• Leadership is inspiring people to the right

thing• Can these succeed?– Poor management with good leadership?– Poor leadership with good management?

Leadership: motivating people

• Use monetary rewards cautiously• Intrinsic rewards– Recognition– Achievement– The work itself– Responsibility– Advancement– Novelty

Define success and failure

Management

• Empirical project planning and scheduling• Risk management• Metrics-based management against targets• Defect tracking

Scheduling

• Must begin immediately, even with limited information

• A list of tasks– Start dates– Duration– Assigned resources (people)– Predecessors and successors

• Getting buy-in from the team– Use historical data and increments

Example schedule in OpenProj

Scheduling terms

• Critical path (in red)– Any delay along these tasks result in a delayed

project– Can be found manually, but tools often do this for

you• Slack– The amount of time a task can be delayed without

affecting the schedule– No slack along the critical path

More scheduling terms

• Resource leveling– Making sure that no person is working above

100% capacity at any point in time– Happens when multiple tasks are scheduled for

the same person– Break up a task into smaller, sequential tasks with

a dependency between them (i.e. take more time); tools can automatically do this for you

– Or, manually add additional resources to the task so no one is working over 100%

Scheduling for Agile projects

• Do we need to plan, even if we’re only looking a month ahead?

• Sure!– Sprint burndown charts– Release burndown charts

Sprint burndown chart

• Exercise: Are we ahead of schedule, or behind?

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Sprint burndown chart

• Answer: behind. • Exercise: But how would you tell if this is

something to worry about or not?

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Sprint burndown chart

• Answer: Look at previous burndown charts – maybe things are slower the first couple of days, but then pick up!

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Earned Value Management

• How much work you planned to have accomplished by now (in dollars or hours) called the Planned Value

• How much you have actually spent by now (in dollars or hours), called Actual Cost

• The value, in terms of your baseline budget, of the work accomplished by now (in dollars or hours), called the Earned Value!

• Budgeted (cost) at completion (BAC) - The sum of all the PVs

Idea is to link schedule and cost together to monitor both in the same “units” of value

Earned Value Management Example

• We’ve budgeted $200 to buy, setup, network, and test a new system– Our PVs are $50 to buy, $75 to setup, $50 to

network, and $25 to test– Our BAC is therefore $200

• Right now, we have spent $60 (AC) and have completed the buying phase (EV of $50)– Are we on schedule?– Are we on budget?

EVM Example 2

PLANNED VALUE (Budgeted cost of the work scheduled) = 18 + 10 + 16 + 6 = $50

EARNED VALUE (Budgeted cost of the work performed) = 18 + 8 + 14 + 0 = $40

ACTUAL COST (of the work performed) = $45 (Data from Acct. System) Therefore:

Schedule Variance = 40 - 50 = -$10 Schedule Performance Index = 40 / 50 = 0.8

Line is at 16, blue bar ends at 14

Line is at 6

Scope Creep

• The scope of your project is the work you originally planned to do

• Scope creep is when more tasks are added, without adding more resources– Happens often. Exercise: What are some reasons

of needing additional tasks?– Exercise: What is the cause of scope creep (not

adding more resources, otherwise we just consider it scope change)?

Scope Creep

• Answer: What are some reasons of needing additional tasks?– competitor has some new feature– customer forgot something– received more money– misunderstood original requirements

• Answer: What is the cause of scope creep (not adding more resources, otherwise we just consider it scope change)?– adding more requirements without having a manager that

will insist on more resources to compensate

Avoiding scope creep

• Joint Application Development– between management and customer

• Formal change approval– forces compensation for doing more work

• Defer additional requirements for future versions– “What a great idea! Let’s do it in version 2! By the

way, I’ll need $XXXX for version 2…” job security!

Management

• Empirical project planning and scheduling• Risk management– Another lecture

• Metrics-based management against targets– Another lecture

• Defect tracking– Another lecture

Quiz review

• What is the difference between management and leadership?

• What is true of any task on the critical path?• How is scope creep different than adding more

requirements/features?• What is Planned Value?• What is Earned Value?• What is Actual Cost?• How do we know when we are over/under budget/time in

Earned Value Management? – create formulas for these four cases using PV, EV, and AC

In-class exercises

• Give an example of a good intrinsic reward at work• Create a schedule for students next semester for

the following CS321 assignments:– project assignments {use cases, class diagram, swimlane

diagram, sequence diagram, coding, testing}– essay outline, essay draft– studying for final– consider duration, dependencies, and opportunity for

parallelization• Due next class