Abstract
Business executives and developers look at projects differently. This chapter focuses on what the business executives need to authorize a project, and how to separate one project from another in terms of selecting the “best” project for the organization at the time. It explains what information is needed to get a project started, and how its scope is refined to prepare it for the development team. The project manager and business analyst must understand both the business management and development team perspectives to maintain the goals of both groups.
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- 1.
ROI is meant here in the general sense: a payback of the investment made, and is not to be confused with the very specific calculation called ROI.
- 2.
The sunrise period shown in Figure 2-1 is equal to the product development time, a common metric for determining zero-defect products.
- 3.
By statistical standards, there is no such thing as a zero-defect product because the product must be monitored for an infinite amount of time before such a claim can be made. The newer definition was announced at an OOPSLA conference in 1996.
- 4.
TOC can be affected due to insufficient documentation and support materials resulting in future maintainers having to spend extra time “learning” the code and other factors of maintaining existing software. This will usually result in a higher TOC.
- 5.
An “operational” project can get confused with operational tasks. A project is a “temporary endeavor that is undertaken to create a unique product, service or result” (PMBOK 2013), and is very different from operational tasks, which are recurring and provide continual support for the organization. Operations and projects follow different sets of rules.
- 6.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) protects the privacy of individually identifiable health information. See http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy .
- 7.
An important Agile rule says to never use the same core team member for multiple concurrent projects (multitasking), but some people are not needed full-time, such as database analysts, tech writers, or representatives from the help desk or operations team.
- 8.
The PMBOK (2013) defines a program is “a collection of related projects, subprograms, or program activities managed in a coordinated way to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually” (553); and a portfolio as “project, programs, subportfolios, and operations managed as a group to achieve strategic objectives.” (551).
- 9.
The ten BOKs can be easily remembered by the mnemonic “I Saw Two Crows Quietly Having Coffee and Reading Poetry Slowly,” referring to Integration, Scope, Time, Cost, Quality, Human Resource, Communications, Risk, Procurement, and Stakeholder Management, respectively. Special thanks to Richard Vail of Vail Training Associates.
- 10.
Adapted from a white paper first published at www.carolla.com by Carolla Development, Inc. (Cline 2000)
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© 2015 Alan Cline
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Cline, A. (2015). The Birth of a Project: Portfolio Management. In: Agile Development in the Real World. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-1679-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-1679-8_2
Publisher Name: Apress, Berkeley, CA
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