please give answer for the question subject project manageme

please give answer for the question

subject project: management

What makes IT projects different from other types of project? How should project managers adjust to these differences? Justify your response.

Solution

IT projects are different from other types of projects for the following reasons:

1. Requirements are not available before the start of the project. These requirements may change during the development as various options arise during that stage. In other types of projects, requirements are very clear and the execution is decided immediately after that and not during execution.

2. Users may not be in a postion to express the requirements. The people discuss the requirements without understanding the usablity.

3. Users may have to learn the new environments or operating systems to start using the project / application developed. Users may have to learn all the features in short time and keep using them for the life of the project. There are difficulties to keept applying the knowledge they gained during training.

4. In development perspective the technology to be used to develop the project is decided by a management considing the requirements. There are situations in which the developers may not so good to understand the requirements and apply the technology they have been asked to develop. They try to get solutions from experts and apply them without understanding the technology. The developers work based on the timings they have been. The quality assurance team may not apply all the test cases and skills required to test the project or application developed.

5. The management team may not have the technology used by the developers to keep track of the exact development. There would be differences of opinion about the requirements between them with developers. Even a small misunderstanding may change the entire project. If the number of levels through which the requirements passes is more, the developers might be getting a different set of requirements.

6. There are situations in which not all the requirements or documented or missing test cases or communication gaps between, business analysts and users in collecting the requirements.

7. There are situations at which design tasks are not carried out properly and developers asked to carry out coding.

8. If right technologies are not followed, the changes required later would be impossible to apply in the projects.

9. Right tools like IDE, version control systems, tracking tools, bug trackers etc. should be used - not all developers might be knowing the right set of tools to use.

10. It is not possible to give the right effort estimation before the start of the project as the requirements keep changing.

Project managers should do the following:

1. Proper co-ordination is required from the users / clients to the developers.

2. The exact requirements should be properly documented and passed to the development team and the technology should be agreed upon in the beginning itself. The users should also be aware that and if possible user should be given required amout of training on the technology or operating systems.

3. Project managers should review the design few times before pass it to the coders.

4. Confirm whether the technology going to be used will meet the requirements.

5. Project managers should ensure: Test cases are written after understanding all the requirements. Even minute details are observed by the team. What the testing methods going to be used.

6. Project manager should give importance to the tools used in design and development: IDE, version control systems etc. so that they would be used till the completion of the project.

7. Periodic review of the project with the coders should be conducted. Software development methodologies should be properly followed. For example, Agile methodology for changing requirements - scrum meetings should be conducted and follow the status of the development.

8. Periodic build should be given to clients to test the project whether their requirements are followed or not.

9. Documenting the development status, interacting with developers to understand the difficulties and bringing required help would enable faster completion of the project.

10. Making the developers to learn the latest technologies and tools would enable them to compete with other related software projects. This would help the project to come to market at the earliest.