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