End of chapter Questions and Answers
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User involvement and support: The commitment of users and user management to the project cannot be assured and many projects get behind schedule because users cannot find time to review products such as the Requirements Specification. In the pre-project stage, the project manager should try to form a view about the users and their commitment to the project and should make sure that user responsibilities are fully spelled out in the Project Initiation Document. In addition, it is wise to take user dependencies into account in preparing the project plan and to avoid, if possible, putting user tasks on the ‘critical path’ (see chapter 10). Installation and commissioning: This stage of a project is often either forgotten or underestimated and can, in fact, turn out to be a considerable piece of work. Some thought needs to be given to what form of implementation is required (gradual cutover, ‘big bang’ or parallel run with old system), that work should be planned like any other and proper estimates produced and reviewed by people with experience in the area. Warranty: If a system is being developed under contract, it often carries a warranty for a period of months, or perhaps for a year. If so, then an assessment needs to be made of what claims there could be against the warranty and some contingency should be built in to cover it. Political pressure: Often, estimators come under pressure to reduce their estimates so that some timescale or budgetary constraint can be met. Resisting this requires a certain amount of willpower but it can be made easier if the estimates have been developed on sound principles, so that the argument does not degenerate into one person’s guess against another’s. Chapter 10 Scheduling and resourcing Q1 Explain the difference between effort and elapsed time. What is the significance of this difference for project planning purposes? Effort is the total volume of work involved in a task and is best thought of as how long it would take to accomplish if one person were assigned to it. Elapsed time, on the other hand, is how long the task will take from start to finish and this will depend on the effort involved, how many people are assigned to the task and what delays or external dependencies are involved. (Creating and correcting an interview report may, for instance, involve half a day’s effort but take two weeks’ elapsed time because the interviewee is slow to review the document and send back corrections.) In planning, estimates usually (and rightly) focus on effort but, when transferring the estimates to the schedules (the dependency network and bar chart), elapsed time also has to be considered. In particular, issues like fixed ‘lead times’ for obtaining equipment have to be taken into account. Q2 Scheduling a project involves understanding the degree to which project tasks can be partitioned. What is meant by this term and what effect does partitioning have on the scheduling process? ‘Partitioning’ means that a task can be split between more than one person. If, say, it takes one man ten days to dig a hole, partitioning it between two men will presumably mean that the hole can be dug in five days. However, it would probably not be true that ten men could dig it in one day, partly because they would get in each other’s way and partly because some of the time would have to be used in co-ordinating their efforts rather than actual digging. This leads to the important lesson that one cannot go on partitioning a task indefinitely and, at some point, one arrives at a task that it is not sensible to partition any more – writing-up the results of an interview for example. Q3 In long-term project planning, it is wise to assume that staff will be available for project work for less than 100 per cent of the total available time. What factors will reduce staff availability and what adjustments should be made for them? Staff will be unavailable for project work due to:
The normal way of allowing for this is to schedule people for only four, rather than five, days’ work over the duration of a project. For shorter-term planning, where holidays and training courses are known about, slightly more than four days per week may be planned for. Q4 What do you understand by the term project milestone? How would you decide how many milestones to show on your project plan? A milestone is a point at which progress on the project can be measured. To be useful, milestones should be attached to the completion of significant deliverables, such as the acceptance of a Requirements Specification. There need to be sufficient milestones on a project plan to allow for adequate control but not so many that their significance is reduced. Q5 The PRINCE2® project management method envisages a hierarchy of plans. Describe this hierarchy. At the top level, there would be a Project Plan that covers the main aspects of the project but at a high level of aggregation. Each project stage should then be the subject of a more detailed Stage Plan. Where different teams are involved in the project, each may have a very detailed Team Plan for its activities. Where it becomes evident to a manager in a PRINCE2® project that their part of the work is likely to go outside its agreed tolerances, they need to complete an exception report to explain the position and an Exception Plan showing how they propose to adjust the work to deal with the situation. An Exception Plan can exist at any or all of project, stage or team levels and, if approved, takes the place of the relevant Project, Stage or Team Plan. Chapter 11 Monitoring progress Q1 How is effort monitored on a project? It is important that the effort to be spent on activities is reassessed on a regular basis – why is this so vital? Effort is best measured by asking team members to keep timesheets, showing where exactly – on which tasks – work has been done. This is important so that the project manager can keep track of effort and re-evaluate what the final outturn of the project is likely to be. In addition, the effort figures will provide valuable data for people who may be trying to estimate similar projects in the future. Q2 Staff time is usually the principal cost component of an IS project. Describe five other areas where project costs could arise. Project costs also arise from:
Q3 Describe three methods than could be used to exercise quality control and explain the advantages and disadvantages of each. Methods include:
Q4 In what circumstances might you consider increasing the volume and/or frequency of quality control checks? When might you decrease their volume or frequency? Where a team member is inexperienced, or just unknown, the project manager may increase the volume and/or frequency of quality control checks until they are satisfied that the work is of a sufficient standard. Similarly, checks may be increased where problems have been uncovered with a particular individual or area of work. Where the existing pattern of checks is uncovering few or no problems, checks may be decreased in frequency or volume and particular team members may be given more freedom to work in their own way. Q5 What does the term ‘earned value analysis’ mean? What additional insights into the dynamics of a project is afforded by the use of EVA. Earned value means, in effect, the proportion of a project’s total planned deliverable that has been produced by a given point. Conventional measurement techniques have tended to concentrate on effort, or other resources, expended, without considering what has been achieved for that expenditure, whereas EVA takes into account both expenditure and achievement. Q6 Explain these terms: actual cost of work performed (ACWP); budgeted cost of work performed (BCWP); budgeted cost of work scheduled (BCWS).
Chapter 12 Exercising control Q1 What is meant by the term the triple constraint? What are the three elements of the triple constraint and why is an understanding of their relative weight important in exercising control over a project? The term ‘triple constraint’ refers to the fact that any project takes place within the envelope of the time it is expected to take, the budget available and some understanding of what has to be delivered, expressed as scope, product or quality.
Q2 Your project is behind schedule and you are considering adding extra staff to the team. What would be the potential advantages and disadvantages of this approach? Provided that the slippage is spotted early enough, adding extra staff may be a feasible strategy as there will be time for them to be trained and become familiar with the project. Otherwise, adding extra people may actually be counterproductive, as training them and/or bringing them up to speed on the project may distract the existing staff from getting on with their work. However, if the slippage is diagnosed as being due to a lack of expertise or experience within the project team, bringing in a few experts may well enable the project to recover. Q3 In what circumstances might you (a) increase or (b) decrease the amount of supervision given to a team member? Where a quality problem has been detected in an individual’s work, or where they seem inexperienced or unsure of themselves, it may be advisable for them to be supervised more closely. However, this can prove demoralising to experienced and capable people and the correct approach here may be to give them a lot of latitude to exercise their professional judgement in how they go about their work. Q4 Changes often bedevil IS projects. What steps are required to ensure that proper change control is exercised on a project? An effective change control system includes the following steps:
Q5 Explain the difference between change control and configuration management and the relationship between them. Change control is the management of the scope of a project. Configuration management is the control of the versions of its deliverables and how they fit together. Good configuration management records enable a project manager to assess the extent of the impact of a proposed change, in other words to see which deliverables are likely to be affected and how. Chapter 13 Reporting progress Q1 What factors would you consider when deciding on the frequency with which you would report progress to (a) senior IS management, and (b) customer management? A major factor to consider when deciding the frequency of reporting to anyone is how long the actual project is; obviously, if the project takes only two weeks, a monthly reporting cycle is not going to be of much use!
Q2 What is meant by the term exception reporting? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of this type of reporting? Exception reports concentrate on what has not gone according to plan, the idea being that things going according to plan is what is supposed to happen and therefore can be assumed unless informed otherwise. The great advantage of exception reporting is that it makes for short, succinct reports that focus management’s attention where it should be – on what is going wrong. However, because of this, pure exception reporting tends to assume a rather negative cast and the recipients of the reports will get the impression that everything is going wrong – because that is all they are told about! So, most managers tend to depart from the pure exception format to emphasise the achievements, as well as the problems, of their team. Q3 What are the benefits to the project manager in providing regular progress reports to the project team members? People working on a project like to have an understanding of how it’s doing and where what they do fits in to the overall picture. On a large project, in particular, team members can feel ‘buried’ in their own work with little visibility of the ‘big picture’. Also, where bad news – such as delays and technical problems – gets known all too readily on the ‘grapevine’, better news about deliverables successfully achieved or how pleased the clients are with progress often gets overlooked. In addition to these morale-building aspects of reporting progress to team members, it is also the case that solutions to problems often come from unlikely sources – perhaps someone who is not directly involved in the issue but who can offer a different and useful perspective on it. Q4 Explain the following terms used in the PRINCE2® project management method:
Chapter 14 Quality Q1 How could the quality culture behaviours described in section 14.3 be applied in a hospital? The total quality management approach and culture are very readily applied to a hospital. In general, people working there will be committed to is mission and will be striving to find better ways to meeting their patients’ needs. A certain degree of hierarchy is inevitable in the hospital – a surgeon must, for instance, be in charge in the operating theatre – but modern hospitals are seeing a greater sharing of responsibilities between, say, doctors and senior nurses and this is leading to more egalitarian approach. Resources are usually a problem, especially in state-funded hospitals but this does lead to a need to make sure that scarce resources are utilised most efficiently. Q2 Why do you suppose there are an increasing number of organisations concerned with the development of quality practices for IS development? Information systems often represent considerable expenditure for organisations and this has been coupled with increasing scepticism about the value obtained for the funds spent. At the same time, IS is often central to an organisation’s operations and key to its growth and development. In these circumstances, managers will want to ensure that the development and maintenance of the IS investment is carried out in the most efficient and effective manner and that the resultant systems are fully ‘fit for purpose’. Apart from these considerations, many organisations have to satisfy their customers that their working practices conform to standards such as ISO9001 and this will often include the information systems that support these practices. Q3 What is the purpose of a Quality Plan? Who should create it? The Quality Plan essentially defines how the work is to be carried out and it is complementary to the Project Plan which is concerned with what is to be done, when and by whom. The Quality Plan documents the methods and standards that will be used to perform the work and also to check that it meets its defined quality standards. The finished plan provides a source of reference for the project team to tell them how they should be approaching their work. The Quality Plan should be created by the project manager and provides him or her with an opportunity to really think through what methods are most appropriate to this particular project. Q4 Do you agree with what Dick Brandon said about sex in section 14.10? Do not take this question too seriously! Although the quotation had a humorous intent, it does highlight a serious issue. One of the biggest problems that beset people trying to maintain and enhance systems – not to mention their initial development – is a lack of enough detailed documentation. Although one can inspect a code listing and find out what a program does, that is very far from knowing why it works that way and what were the underlying business rules. With very old systems, it can become a case of ‘one step forwards, two steps back’ because the whole underlying design concept has been totally lost due to a failure to keep documentation up to date. On a more prosaic level, failing to keep the configuration records of documents up to date can waste enormous amounts of time as people do a lot of work only to discover that they have been working with a superseded version. Chapter 15 Risk management Q1 Why is the use of risk management techniques becoming increasingly important in IS projects? IS projects – like projects in many other disciplines – are becoming increasingly complex, with new technologies, demanding business goals and multi-party contractual arrangements. As complexity increases, so does risk and the need to manage it in a more formal and structured way. In addition to this, for projects undertaken by external suppliers, there has been a gradual movement towards fixed-price contracting, which tends to shift the risk from the customer onto the supplier and therefore causes the supplier to take risk much more seriously. Q2 Describe a five-stage process for project risk management. The main stages in project risk management are:
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