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

Vendors

A vendor is any company, not your own, from which you obtain hardware, software, services, or information. If the application is installed in an existing environment, probably no vendor contacts are needed. If, however, acquisition of software, hardware, or both is planned, there are three types of contact with the vendor that take place. The first is proposal communication, the second is for negotiations, and the last is customer support.

A Request for Proposal (RFP) is a document developed by the PM and SE to solicit bids from potential vendors. Vendors are asked to respond with an estimate of service and price within some number of days (e.g., 30). All bids received by the cut-off date are reviewed. Proposal communications are usually limited to information about the proposal. RFPs are accepted and responded to by vendor marketing staff with some technical assistance. Project manager contact is with the marketer. 

Part of the RFP process is the development of a list of required features for the item being bid upon. This list should have priorities and weights assigned to it during the proposal stage for use during the analysis. Bids are rated on the requirements then compared to see which vendor most closely meets the needs of the application. 

When a vendor is selected, a contract must be negotiated. Negotiation may be with the marketer, but might also be with a financial person or with the marketer's manager. Similarly, the project manager might do all or some of the negotiation with assistance from a financial person or his or her manager. Negotiations deal with price, time period of the contract, number of sites, number of users, type of license, guarantees in case the vendor goes out of business, warrantees, and so on. There is no one way to negotiate, and most often, all negotiations are turned over to legal staff for completion of contract terms. It is important never to commit to any terms until they are seen and approved by some manager in the organization. Frequently, contracts have far-reaching implications that an individual project manager may not know.