Four P's of Software Project Management

The effective software project management Focuses on four P's.

The People
The Product
The Process
The Project

The People

The following categories of people are involved in the software process.

Senior Managers
Project Managers
Practitioners
Customers
End Users

Senior Managers define the business issue. Project Managers plan,motivate, Organize and control the practitioners who do the Software work.Practitioners deliver the technical skills that are necessary to engineer a product or application.Customer specifies the requirements for the software to be developed.End Users interact with the software once it is released.

The Product

Before a software project is planned, the product objectives and scope should be established, technical and management constraints should be identified. Without this information it is impossible to define a reasonable cost,amount of risk involved,the project schedule etc. A software project scope must be unambiguous and understandable at the management and technical levels. To develop a reasonable project plan we have to functionally decompose the problem to be solved.

The Process

Here the important thing is to select an appropriate process model to develop the software.There are different process models available.They are Water fall model,Iterative water fall model,Prototyping model,Evolutionary model,RAD(Rapid Application Development) model, Spiral model.In practice we may use any one of the above models or a combination of the above models.

The Project

In order to manage a successful software project,we must understand what can go wrong (so that problems can be Avoided)and how to do it right. A project is a series of steps where we need to make accurate decision so as to make a successful project.