About the management of a project

Q1: What is the infeasible project? How are infeasible projects handled?

Ans. A project is infeasible due to following reasons:

• The scope of the project is not properly defined.
• Time limit for the project is not specified.
• Required resources for the project are not provided.
• The understanding of the project is not clear.
• Strategical alignment of the project is not there.

An example of a common scenario that can occur between a Project Owner and Project Manager:

• A final date of the project is s specified, but the scope of the project is not clearly defined.

To manage an infeasible project, we need to revisit the project scoping statement and the 3 fundamental elements of a project's scope:

• Understand the project objective clearly.
• Get a clarity about the output of the project.
• Enlist  the target output.

Once the scoping statement has been completed, there are four questions to answers:

1. How much funds are to invest and on what?

2. Who should take over the work, and what should be the load for each person?

3. What work is included in the scope? i.e. what work is required to produce the agreed Outputs.

4. How long will the project take?

Q2: Discuss the possible rational for including or not including the cost in an organization's productivity measures.

Ans.: Cost-benefit analysis is used mainly to assess the financial status of  large private and public sector projects. Private sector organizations  use many project appraisal techniques, such as rate of return etc. Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) estimates and totals  the equivalent financial value of the profits and costs to the projects to know whether they are worthwhile to develop. In order to finalise the feasibility of a project all aspects of the project, positive and negative, must be expressed in terms of a common unit; i.e., there must be a "bottom line." The most convenient common unit is money. This means that all profits and costs of a project should be measured in financial terms. A program may provide benefits which are not directly expressed in financial terms but there is some amount of money the company would consider just as good as the project's benefits. For example, a project may provide a free monthly visit to a doctor for a senior citizen. The value of that benefit to a senior citizen is the minimum amount of money that that recipient would take instead of the medical care. This could be less than the market value of the medical care provided. A cost benefit analysis finds, quantifies, and adds all the positive factors. Then it identifies, quantifies, and subtracts all the negatives. The difference between the two indicates whether the planned action is advisable. The real trick to doing a cost benefit analysis well is making sure you include all the costs and all the benefits and properly quantify them.

Q3: Which guidelines are taken into consideration for the successful development and management of the project?

Ans.: The guidelines taken into consideration are:

• Greater interactions of the  manager.
• Greater response from users.
• More power and decisions making authority.
• Greater money control and Liquidity.
• Greater Control over man power.
• Clearly specified requirements and scope.
• Using business strategies in IT projects.
• Clarity of project management on top management level, project boards and clients.
• Greater realism in setting targets.
• Appointment of a supportive project/programme office.
• Executive Support
• User Involvement
• Experienced project manager
• Clear business objectives
• Minimised scope
• Standard software infrastructure
• Firm basic requirements
• Formal methodology
• Reliable estimates

Q4: List out Five common errors that occur in requirement analysis. Explain in brief.

Ans.: The five common errors that occur in requirement analysis are:

1. Customers don't don't have the clarity of the project they want

The common problem in the requirements analysis phase is that customers don't have a clear picture of what they want, and it's up to the development team to ask the right questions and perform the analysis necessary to understand the requirement of the client and write software requirements specification that can be used as the basis for both a project plan and an engineering architecture.

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2. Change in requirement during the development of the project

The second most common problem with software projects is that the requirements changes many times during the development phase of the project. This may occur because as development progresses and prototypes are developed, customers sees problems clearly and finds some errors in the project and then suggests some changes; it may also occur because changes in the external environment require reshaping of the original business problem and hence a different solution is defined to run the system smoothly than the one originally proposed. Good project managers are aware of these possibilities and typically already have backup plans in place to deal with these changes.

3. Customers don't provide enough time for the project development

Customers usually demand their projects to be completed as soon as possible and they provide very short time limits and developers also agree upon this condition of theirs without even doing detailed analysis and understanding of both the scope of the project and the resources necessary to develop it. In accepting an unreasonable timeline without discussion, you are doing an injustice to your customer as well as to yourself

4. Existence of gap between customers, engineers and project managers

Often, customers and engineers don't communicate clearly with each other because they do not understand technical terms in the same way as the engineers do. This can lead to unclear project understanding and ultimately the project going to a wrong direction. An important task of a project manager, especially during the requirements analysis phase, is to ensure that both parties have a precise understanding of the deliverable and the tasks needed to achieve it.

5. The development team doesn't understand the politics of the customer's organization

An effective manager is one who understands the importance of power, conflict, negotiation and coalitions. Such a manager is not only operationally and functionally skilled, but he or she also understands the importance of setting goals for common purposes.

Q5: Is it beneficial to design a new system or cope up with the old system. Comment

Ans.: The decision of designing a new system or coping up with an existing system depends upon the factors that whether any up gradations in the existing system can fulfill the requirements of the proposed system or we need a drastic change in the existing system to develop the proposed system. If the requirements of the proposed system are fulfilled by some minor changes in the existing system then we can use the existing system. And if the proposed system requires the whole new system infrastructure as well as the software requirements then we have to set up a new system. In most of the cases, an up gradation of the existing is preffered because it saves the cost as well as the time for setting up a new system.

Q6: List out in detail several techniques which can be employed to elicit requirements?

Ans.: Requirements Elicitation Techniques:

• Brainstorming: Brainstorming sessions are used to let the stakeholders come up with creative ideas or new approaches to a problem.
• Workshops: Workshops are facilitated meetings with multiple stakeholders.
• /www.it-career-coach.net/category/interviewing/">Interviewing: Interviews are in-person; one-on-one meetings where the /www.it-career-coach.net/category/business-analyst/">business analyst asks questions to get information from the stakeholder. With an /www.myjobsearchcoaching.com/more-information/" target="_blank">interview you can quickly obtain a lot of requirements from one person. However, you still need to examine those requirements to make sure they do not conflict with other stakeholder needs.
• Surveys: Surveys are used to gather information anonymously from the stakeholders.
• Documentation Review: This is the process of obtaining requirements from written documentation such as manuals.
• Prototyping: This is the use of partially finished versions of the software that have been created to help validate requirements.
• Focus Groups: Focus Groups are group interviews with potential and/or actual users where the /www.it-career-coach.net/category/business-analyst/">business analyst raises issues and questions to obtain information from the stakeholders. Focus groups are a collaborative technique that lets you gather a lot of information. It includes a measure of brainstorming which is good when the users don't know what they really want or need from the system.
• Observation: Observation is when the business analyst watches the users performing their daily tasks and asks questions about the tasks and work. This technique gives you the advantage of actually seeing what the users do as they work as opposed to what they tell you they do. Observation helps the analyst develop a real understanding of the user's on the /www.myjobsearchcoaching.com/more-information/" target="_blank">job issues.

A good business analyst should have excellent skills choosing and using the right elicitation technique for each situation. If you are not familiar with using some of these elicitation techniques, consider /www.businessanalystbootcamp.com/more-information/" target="_blank">Business Analyst Training increase your value to your organization by your ability to elicit complete, correct, consistent, clear, concise and feasible requirements.