Planning a Project

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 455.

Read the text and be ready to answer the questions.

Reading

A specification is the definition of your project: a statement of the problem, not the solution.

`The agreement upon a written specification has several benefits:-the clarity will reveal misunderstandings, - the completeness will remove contradictory assumptions, - the rigour of the analysis will expose technical and practical details which numbties normally gloss over through ignorance or fear, the agreement forces all concerned to actually read and think about the details. The places to look for errors in a specification are: - the global context, - the interfaces, - time-scales, external dependencies.

Having decide what the specification intends, your next problem is to decide what you and your team actually need to do, and how to do it. As a manager, you have to provide some form of framework both to plan and to communicate what needs doing. To take the planning forward, therefore, you need to turn the specification into a complete set of tasks with a linking structure.

In planning any project, you follow the same simple steps: if an item is too complicated to manage, it becomes a list of simpler items. People call this producing a work breakdown structure to make it sound more formal and impressive

The next stage is a little complicated. You now have to allocate the tasks to different people in the team and, at the same time, order these tasks so that they are performed in a sensible sequence. Task allocation is not simply a case of handing out the various tasks on your final lists to the people you have available; it is far more subtle (and powerful) than that. As a manager you have to look far beyond the single project; indeed any individual project can be seen as merely a single step in your team's development. The allocation of tasks should thus be seen as a means of increasing the skills and experience of your team - when the project is done, the team should have gained.

In simple terms, consider what each member of your team is capable of and allocate sufficient complexity of tasks to match that (and to slightly stretch). You must have the broad outlines by which to monitor progress, and sufficient detail to assign each task when it needs to be started, but beyond that - stop and do something useful instead.