Project Management
The software engineer and the project manager provide complementary skills and work collaboratively on shared activities. The three main activities of the project manager are organizational liaison, personnel management, and project monitoring and control. The "Liaison" section discusses the project manager's role as a go-between for the technical team and agents who are not members of the technical team (such as project sponsors, users, IS management, vendors, and so on).
In the "Personnel Management" section, you will learn that this job entails working with personnel and human resources to hire, fire, and provide employees with professional development.
The "Monitor and Control" section explains that project monitoring involves tracking project progress relative to budget. Project control means implementing changes when progress is not satisfactory (such as training or revising project plans).
Liaison
Operations
Operations affect the project differently depending on the phase. In early phases, word processing and PCs must be available for documentation. Computer-aided software engineering tool access might be required. Timing, type, and needs of access should be planned and negotiated well in advance. The kinds of problems a team might suffer from no access may delay documentation but does not delay the work of analysis. In the worst case, the work can be done manually.
During design, the database administrator must have access and resources allocated for the definition and population of a test database. This must also be negotiated well in advance.
During implementation, old data must be converted to the new format and environment, programs must be placed in production, and users begin using the application. At this time, the operations department assumes responsibility for running the application. This responsibility must also be planned and negotiated in advance.
When programming and testing begin, all project members need access to compilers, test database, editors, and, possibly, testing tools to work on their programs. Absence of resources at this time can severely delay project completion. For each day of
person-time lost, there can be one day of project delivery time lost. Timing, type, and volume of access are all negotiated items. Advance negotiation should begin at least one month prior to the need. Most operations managers will tell you they want
to know about a demand for their resources as soon as you can identify the demand and the date needed. Most operations managers will also tell you they want all requirements at once. So you should be prepared to discuss analysis, design, and implementation
needs before much work takes place.
In general, operations managers need to know what the project needs from them and when. They also should be sent progress reports and told of any problems that affect the use of their resources.