Breaking down software project work is a crucial step in software project management. It helps you define the scope, estimate the effort, assign the tasks, and track the progress of your project. But how do you break down software project work effectively and efficiently? Here are some tips and best practices to help you with this process.
Before you can break down software project work, you need to understand the requirements of your project. What are the goals, objectives, and deliverables of your project? Who are the stakeholders, users, and customers of your project? What are their needs, expectations, and preferences? How will you measure the success of your project? You can use various techniques to elicit, analyze, validate, and document the requirements, such as interviews, surveys, workshops, prototypes, user stories, use cases, and diagrams.
In software development, success extends beyond functionality. It entails comprehending user needs, crafting apt solutions, and analyzing requirements thoroughly. This involves exploring user expectations, market dynamics, and competitors to deliver effective solutions. Understanding the company's field is crucial. Emphasizing broad research and not limiting it to a few interviews ensures the delivery of meaningful solutions that address real challenges.
Although am not in typical project management, but I am a Sr Solution Architect, but I do participate in Discovery phase which is gathering requirements, analyzing the scope and business process. Before an Architect and/or PM take up the project work, should understand 1. Define clear business goal, objective or vision of the project 2. Perform gap analysis from the business process perspective. 3. Break down the objectives into sub process and expected deliverables 4. Identify stakeholders, Technology, tools and skill set required 5. Define application and data architecture for the entire solution. Review with the business users. 6. Apply relevant methodologies in every stage from Planning, execution, delivery, Change Mtmt etc
Once you have the requirements, you need to define the scope of your project. The scope is the set of features, functions, and quality standards that your project will deliver. It also includes the boundaries, assumptions, constraints, and exclusions of your project. You can use a scope statement to describe the scope in detail and a scope baseline to record the approved scope. You can also use a work breakdown structure (WBS) to decompose the scope into smaller and manageable pieces of work.
Defining scope is huge task, which requires lot of efforts in collaborating with business stake holders. Conduct regular review meetings, track objective of every business function to best granular level, proactively mention the limitations, challenges, supported features, exclusions, future scope etc. In my experience, tracking the WBS and frequent review with business users in sprint calls helps to avoid surprises in the delivery. An effective communication to stakeholders also plays key role here. All the stakeholder must have access to the relevant artifacts as per individual roles.
After you have the scope, you need to estimate the effort required to complete each piece of work. The effort is the amount of time, resources, and costs that your project will consume. You can use various methods to estimate the effort, such as expert judgment, analogy, parametric, bottom-up, and three-point estimation. You can also use tools such as spreadsheets, software, and templates to facilitate the estimation process.
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In my experience, estimating project efforts is challenging until it's broken down into smaller parts using Facades, Microservices, etc., ensuring reliable estimates. A well-defined architecture, hence a good decoupling of system parts, enables efficient parallel work. However, unforeseen issues like HR changes and technical problems are inevitable. Software development effort cannot be quantified by code output alone; it depends on creativity, team dynamics, and problem complexity, influenced by team experience. Nevertheless, final users/customers expects an estimation of cost and time; therefore, I bet for "Story Points" and "Planning Poker" and quick delivery of POC, add a regular review while adding in advance a contingency or buffer.
This task requires good exposure and experience in project estimations. This task/phase indicates the project cost if internal and hints on the revenue if it is consulting service on the project. Typical consulting organizations considers with their price calculator based on the T&M or Fixed price model: Key factors to consider: Skill wise resource head count, rate - $/hr, duration, tools and licenses Internal project: #Skilled Resources, duration, tools and licenses. Leverage the estimation techniques, like Top-Down, Bottom-up or PERT Chart (Three point) or analogous or other available techniques as applicable
Once you have the effort, you need to assign the tasks to your team members. The tasks are the specific activities that your team members will perform to complete each piece of work. You can use a responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) to define the roles and responsibilities of your team members for each task. You can also use a schedule to sequence the tasks, set the deadlines, and identify the dependencies and milestones.
It's part of Project Planning & execution. Once the team is setup and stabilized, and project is initiated, for medium size team 20-30 members, RAM is critical to define roles and responsibilities for each team member. However in case or large teams above 50, then obviously you break into small teams and each lead must maintain RAM at individual team level.
After you have the tasks, you need to track the progress of your project. The progress is the measure of how much work has been done, how much work remains, and how well the project is meeting the scope, schedule, and budget. You can use various techniques to track the progress, such as status reports, dashboards, charts, graphs, and indicators. You can also use a change control system to manage any changes to the scope, schedule, or budget that may occur during the project.
Track the progress , use various tools , use charts , graph , indicators , change control mechanism.Use and leverage proper mechanism for Scope, schedule and budget.
Finally, you need to review and improve your process of breaking down software project work. You can use feedback, lessons learned, audits, and evaluations to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of your process. You can also use best practices, standards, guidelines, and templates to improve your process. By reviewing and improving your process, you can ensure that you break down software project work consistently and accurately.