Step wise Project Planning

Introduction
• Planning is the core element in the project management in
any domain.
• In plans, you decide how to approach the objectives, satisfy
client’s expectations, define deliverables, break down
products into workable and smaller units, allocating
resources and schedule activities.
• A considerable portion of the people working in the
software industry undermines the value of planning as it
consumes time and efforts.

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Introduction
• However, without planning, they are flying blindly with
no proactive action for any sudden changes.
• In this lecture , a step by step planning framework (STEP
WISE), a complement to PRINCE.

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1. Difference between PMP AND PRINCE
In order to kick off any project, you should determine which
management approach you should adopt to manage the
activities of having your product complete.

1. PMP (Project Management Professional)

• is a general project management standard based on best
practices from various industries.
• However, PMP doesn’t list the steps required to have a
well managed project and considers only the project
manager's role.

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1. Difference between PMP AND PRINCE

2. PRINCE (PRojects IN Controlled Environment)

• It is a general project management methodology that
conveys in a step by step fashion what must be done, when
and where by whom to have a well-managed project,
• However, PRINCE considers only a high level activities such
as control and organization of a project, not the lower level
activities such as scheduling.
• Step Wise covers only the planning stages of a project and
not monitoring and controlling.

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PRINCE is a step-by-step methodology
for managing projects handling high
level activities such as control and
organization of a project.

However, it lacks dealing with the

lower level activities such as
scheduling.

To overcome this issue, STEP WISE

methodology emerged to
complement PRINCE
Step 0: Initiation
• In this step, the key elements for starting the project are
identified such as scope, financial streamlines and
stakeholders
• All initial information is documented in the project charter

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Step 0: Initiation
Example: consider college “Brightmouth” has payroll
processing carried out by a services company. The payroll
services provided to the university is very expensive.
Decision made to bring payroll ‘in-house’ by acquiring an
‘off-the-shelf’ application. The use of the off-the-shelf
system will require a new, internal, payroll office to be set
up. There will be a need to develop some software ‘add-
ons’: one will take payroll data and combine it with time-
table data to calculate the staff costs for each course run in
the college.

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1: Identify project scope and Objectives
This step is the corner stone of all the subsequent steps. it is
about making sure that project stakeholders understand and
confirm the scope of the project that includes goals,
deliverables, tasks, costs and deadlines.

If the stakeholders did not conduct regular meetings put

hands on objectives, deliverables and confirm the scope
before the project being kick started, the project members
will struggle throughout the course of the project.

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Step 1: identify Scope and Objectives

1.1 Identify objectives and measures of

effectiveness in meeting them
1.2 Establish a project authority
1.3 Identify stakeholders
1.4 Modify objectives in the light of stakeholder
analysis
1.5 Establish methods of communication with all
parties

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Step 1: Identify Scope and Objectives
Step 1.1: identify objectives and setting measures of
effectiveness
• Identifying the objectives is the key element of any project
and meeting these objectives is the success criteria to
evaluate the project.
• It is not only meeting the time, budget and scope
constraints but also having the expectations of the client
realized.
• To meet the expectations of the clients, the client should
be engaged frequently to have an overview about the
progress done so far.

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Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives
Step 1.1: Clarifying objectives and setting measures of
effectiveness
• In these meetings the measures of effectiveness and
outstanding customer satisfaction could be depicted as
the elements of the software quality. These elements
could be categorized into 3 quality groups in the software
industry domain: Product operation, Product revision and
Product transition.

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Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives
Step 1.1: Clarifying objectives and setting measures of
effectiveness

Product operation quality factors [10]:

• correctness – having user objectives satisfied
• reliability – minimizing failure rate and maximizing
accuracy
• efficiency – utilizing computer resources to the best of the
capability
• integrity – keeping sensitive data secured
• usability - cutting down effort and time needed to learn
and use

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Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives
Product revision quality factors [10]:
• maintainability – the ability to spot errors and fix them
• testability - testing functions and ensuring they did the
purpose
• flexibility – the ability to modify and tune

Product transition quality factors [10]:

• portability – the ability to have the solution run on
different hardware/OS
• reusability – the easiness of using existing components in
another systems or applications
• interoperability – the effort needed to couple to another
system
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2.1. Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives
Example: Continuing the previous example of Brightmouth college.
The stakeholders of the payroll project have preliminary agreed on
set of objectives:
• Reducing time required to updating employee profiles and
responding to enquiries
• Supporting managers with tools to analyze overtime
• Enabling senior management to have hands on decision support
tools
The stakeholder have set certain measures of effectiveness:
• integrity – As data of high value for the university, they like to have
the data secured and safely kept
• maintainability – the stakeholder asked to find a way for reporting
bugs and fixing them

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Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives
Step 1.2: Defining project authority
This sub step is concerned with the person-in-charge or the
group of executives-in-charge for managing the project,
interacting with the stakeholders, advising strategic
directions and steering the project members.

Example: Setting Brigitte as the project manager for the

Brightmouth college payroll system.

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Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives
Step 1.3: Identify stakeholders
• Missing or underestimating a stakeholder in later stages
might affect adversely the course of the project and that
would cost too much to mitigate and even in case of
recovery the customer satisfaction level might be low.

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Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives
Step 1.3: Identify stakeholders
Continuing the example of Brightmouth college:

Brigitte spotted to extra clients for the new system: the finance
department and the personnel office.

A vice principal agrees to be official client, and monthly

meetings are chaired by the VP and attended by Brigitte and
the heads of finance and personnel.

IT department manager and selected personal staff would be

engaged.

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Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives
Step 1.4: Modify objectives in the light of stakeholder
analysis

• As stakeholders are actively involved in the project to

make sure their objectives and expectation are met,
• They could change the project requirements or
configurations by adding more features.
• These changes might result in creating additional risks.
• The project team should balance the demands, and
maintain proactive communication with stakeholders in
order to deliver a successful project.

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Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives

Continuing the example of the college: the stakeholders

added the extra features:
• portability – as the staff might work from home using
their laptops with the possibility to run the system on
different operating systems
• interoperability – the possibility of the system to be
integrated and linked with many other systems is too high,
so the stakeholders asked to consider this issue.

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Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives

Step 1.5: Establish method of communication

• formal communication methods should be established
such as emails. In case an issue of conflict, the stakeholder
could reply all or to the person in charge to hold operation
or call for meeting to discuss any change.

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Step 1: Defining Scope and Objectives

Step 1.5: Establish method of

communication
In the college example: Brigitte notified
stakeholders that email is the formal way of
communication while addressing the stakeholders
in cc.
Any changes will be notified through emails, in case
of no reply for 5 working days, the change would be
effective as no stakeholder refused the change.
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Step 2:Establish project Infrastructure
Objective :projects are rarely initiated in vacuum. There is some
kind of existing infrastructure in which the project can fit.
Therefore project leader needs to find out about its precise
nature

2.1 Establish relationship between project and strategic

planning
 Establish Framework within which the proposed new system
is to fit
 what H/W and S/W standards are required for system to run
and communicate.
 strategic decisions must be documented in business plan or
strategic business plan
2.2. Step 2: Understanding Client infrastructure

Step 2.1: Establish relationship between project and

strategic planning
• As customer considers injecting a new software system
into the working environment, it is done for the purpose
of satisfying a strategic objective [1].
• In this step the PM should identify the link between the
new project and the existing portfolio projects to make
sure that current and successive IT projects are
compatible with the planned project.

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Step 2:Establish project Infrastructure
2.2 Identify installation standards and procedures
• define development procedures
• Change control and configuration management standards to
ensure that changes to requirements are implemented orderly
• Quality standards & procedures at each point of project life
cycle
 2.2 Identify installation standards and procedures

• For control procedures: Stakeholders must approve changes

before the work is carried out.
• Weekly Informal meetings with Brigette colleagues to discuss
progress and scrutinize details ;
• Monthly meetings with the vice-principal - official boss, and
the heads of the finance and human resources sections to
review progress in general terms.
• For quality procedures, each person in the group has to get
someone else to check through their work when they finish a
major task.
Step 2:Establish project Infrastructure
2.3 Identify project team organization
Project leader can do it at allocate resources phase e.g. in bright
mouth case study business analyst in one group and
programmers in another, development of PC applications will be
done in same group
Step 3: Project Characteristics Analysis

Step 3.1: Determine if the project is product or objective

driven
Project is classified as product driven, in case, a client asked to
have a product to satisfy certain specifications where the
client’s responsibility is adjusting the product to meet his
objectives.

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Step 3: Project Characteristics Analysis

Step 3.1: Determine if the project is product or objective

driven
On the other side, the project is classified as objective driven,
in case, a client asked to develop a system to improve some
service to the users.
In the case of the Brightmouth, the requested system is an
example of objective-driven project [3].

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Step 3: Analyze Project Characteristics
3.2 Analyze other project characteristics (including quality
based ones)
e.g. is this an information system or a process control system or
elements of both or is it safety critical etc.

3.3 Identify high level project risks e.g most risks can be
attributed to operational or development environment,
technical nature of project or type of product being created
Step 3: Analyze Project Characteristics

3.3 Identify high level project risks

In the case of the Brightmouth college, Brigette might face a
technical risk. She is worried about finding a ready-made
product that responds to most requirements raised in the
previous steps earlier.

In case the candidate product has less features than expected

that implies intensive development might be involved.

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Step 3: Analyze Project Characteristics
3.4 Select general lifecycle approach
Waterfall? Incremental? prototype
E.G a prototyping approach might be used when user
requirements are not clear

3.5 Review overall resource estimates

Step 4:Identify project products and deliverables
4.1 Identify and describe the project products (or
deliverables)
Product Breakdown Structure (PBS)
It defines all Work Products, produced by a project.

 The purpose is to first focus on what the project shall

produce, not the activities to perform.

 The project goal is not to undertake activities (tasks), the

project goal is to deliver useful products.
Step 4.1:Identify project products and deliverables
Products are the result of an activity e.g
 Technical products including training material and operating instructions
 Management products (i.e. planning documents) and consists of progress
reports
 A new version of an old product (updated software)
 A product can be a document (software design document), modified
version of something like amended piece of code
 A product can be a person like trained users
 A product is result of an activity

The following are NOT normally products

 Activities (e.g., training, designing, documentation)
PRODUCT BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE EXAMPLE
2.4. Step 4: Identifying Deliverables
In the college example, as Brigette is responsible for selecting the appropriate
software and hardware for the payroll system, she is planning to draft an
invitation to tender for the potential suppliers. In order to do so, she is trying
to find out the elements needed to produce the invitation, therefore, she
developed the PBS for this selection process.
She broke down the products selection process into volume figures (the
number of employees for whom records will have to be maintained), office
layouts (the plans of the physical space for installing servers and equipments),
the user requirements, the invitation to tender document and finally the list
of potential suppliers (to send them the invitation). Then, she broke down the
user requirements into existing system description (analysis of the current
system), the user’s modified requirements (the extra features needed by the
college) and finally the test cases (the cases needed to test the validity of the
system). Brigette decided that the finance department is responsible for
carrying out acceptance testing of the new payroll system.
Pbs
PBS TO MAKE CUP OF TEA
Pbs of mug of tea
 Step 4.2 Document generic product flow

Product flow diagram specifies the sequence in which the products

are to be created. Some of the products need other products to exist
before they can be executed
It is convenient to identify overall product at bottom of diagram
PFD FOR CUP OF TEA
4.3 Produce ideal activity network: It shows the tasks that
have to be carried out and the order in which they have to be
executed
Activity Network example:
example
There is a shed in a garden. The project is to dismantle
the shed and reassemble it in the garden of a close
neighbour. The shed has some rotten pieces. When the
shed has been dismantled, these rotten pieces and
replacements ordered from the company that supplied
the original shed must be identified. New fixtures and
fittings (screws, nuts and bolts, glue etc.) for all pieces
will be needed, so a list of the requirements is to be
made as the shed is dismantled. The neighbour has said
that he will prepare the site for the shed’s new location
as part of his own, separate project.
Pbs of reassembling a shed
Pfd
 4.5 Modify ideal to take into account need for stages
and checkpoints
• To introduce checkpoint activities which are useful
milestones.
• Checkpoints are the activities that draw together
products of previous activities to check that they are
compatible.
STEP 5:Estimate effort for each activity
5.1) Carry out bottom-up estimates
 Estimation of staff effort required
Distinguish carefully between effort and elapsed time
 Effort : Total number of staff-hours (or days etc.) needed
to complete a task
 Elapsed: time between the start and end of the task.

5.2. Revise plan to create controllable activities

Break up very long activities into a series of smaller ones
as we cant judge the status in long activities
Step 6:Identify activity risks
6.1) Identify and quantify activity based risks
Damage if risk occurs (measure in time lost or money)
 Likelihood of risk occurring
Problem of assumption (everything based on assumption and if assumption
wrong then there is a risk)

6.2) Plan risk reduction and contingency measures where appropriate

make contingency plans to eliminate or reduce risks e.g a contingency plan
to use contract staff if team member is unavailable

6.3) Adjust overall plans and estimates to take account of

risks
May change our plans and add new activities to reduce risks.
Step 7:Allocate resources
7.1) Identify and allocate resources
Staff required for each activity is recorded. Staff available for
a project are identified and are allocated to tasks

7.2)Revise plans and estimates to account for

resource constraints
staff are allocated as efficiently as possible, to reduce idle
time (Gantt Charts)
Step 8:Review/publicize plan
8.1 Review quality aspects of project plan
Danger :earlier activity not properly completed and need
to be rework (out of control project).Therefore we need
to have quality reviews, exit requirements and then sign
off
8.2 Document plans and obtain agreement(from all
stakeholders)
Step 9 &10: Execute plan & lower level of planning
Detailed planning at start of each stage, when more
information is available.