LECTURE 8

Project execution &

closure
Content

1 Project monitoring & control

2 Project closure
Introduction

 Projects are inherently dynamic in nature and have unpredictability

about them.
 These two factors call for continuous monitoring and control of
projects lest they go haywire.
 To control and manage this element of unpredictability, you need to
have tools and techniques that can be employed to make the
journey comfortable.
 For software projects, first of all you need to have a well defined
process model, the application of which will help in reducing
uncertainty and in achieving consistency.
 The process model will set steps to be followed for completing all
project tasks and thus help in planning the project.
Introduction

 A good process model also allows measuring both project

processes and the work products.
 Measuring project processes and comparing them with those from
best practices will provide information about productivity, costs and
schedule, and where the project is heading.
 Measuring the quality of product/work product and comparing them
against those achieved with best practices will provide information
about the quality of the work products developed as compared to
what could be achieved using best practices.
 When you have a good project plan in hand, you can execute your
project with much ease
Introduction
Project Monitoring

 A project plan consists of a project schedule and project budget

apart from other plan components like communication plan, quality
plan, configuration plan, resource plan, etc.
 To track the project execution against the plan, there are major and
minor milestones defined in the project schedule.
 When the execution reaches any of these milestones, costs and
schedule can be compared to know how the execution is faring
against the project plan. Then there are tools like status reports,
Goldratt’s critical chain method, Gantt charts, earned value
management (EVM), etc. that help in monitoring and controlling
the project.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Monitor against Project Plan:

 Monitoring against the project plan is the most obvious method
to get project progress reports.
 The project plan is treated as a baseline against which the actual
progress is measured.
 Major and minor milestones are provided in the project plan for
dividing the whole project plan for easy tracking.
 If for some reason a milestone is not achieved as per plan,
then the project manager has to explain to the customer why
the milestone could not be achieved as per plan.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Monitor against Project Plan:

 And if this occurs, what should be done to achieve the next miles
tones on time?
 There are some techniques available like resource leveling,
resource optimization, schedule optimization, etc., which can be
applied to put the project on track.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Monitor against Project Plan:

Project Monitoring Methodology

 Measure Task Progress and Status Reports:

 How can you measure the progress of a project task?
 If you have a task and you want to measure it, then you need to
have information about planned task and actual start dates,
planned volume of work, actual volume of work, and task
duration.
 From the planned and actual volume of work, one can figure out
the remaining work to be done to complete the task.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Measure Task Progress and Status Reports:

Project Monitoring Methodology

 Measure Task Progress and Status Reports:

 If the volume of work is ignored and only dates are taken into
consideration, task progress calculation will be wrong. Suppose
a task starts on April 11 and finishes on April 20. That means the
duration of the task is 10 days. If the project manager is asked to
provide a status report of the task up to April 16, then without me
asuring the volume of work if he says it is 60% (since 6 days of
work has been done out of 10 days) then he is wrong.
 This figure is only the planned work and not the actual work.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Measure Task Progress and Status Reports:

Project Monitoring Methodology

 Measure Task Progress and Status Reports:

 Now suppose the work involves writing source code of size 5
KLOC (kilo lines of code). That means his team should be
writing 0.5 KLOC of source code per day.
 Now if he measures and finds that up to April 16 his team has
written 3.5 KLOC. That means his team has completed 70% of
work. Compared to the planned completion of 60% of work (0.5
× 6/5% = 60%), his team is actually ahead of schedule. This
calculation is done for projects where volume and cost of work
per day during the entire project period are constant. But this
does not happen in reality. To have meaningful calculations, this
aspect also has to be taken care of.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Identify Deviations:
 When project monitoring is done, the focus of the measurements
is to find the deviations from the planned schedule and costs.
 In the example given earlier, the schedule performance achieved
is 70% compared to planned 60%. That means the team is
ahead of schedule by a +10% margin (Figure: Project schedule
deviation).
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Identify Deviations:
 Now suppose total planned cost for the task is $100. If you break
the cost on a daily basis then it comes to $10 per day.
 In our example, up to April 16, planned cost is $60. Now
suppose the actual cost comes to $65. So we have a deviation
of +5%.
 Again these calculations are based on constant volume of work
and cost per day, which does not happen in reality.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Identify Deviations:
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Performance Indicators:
 Performance indicators are used to know the performance of
project in terms of cost, schedule, and quality.
 EVM is a good tool for creating and monitoring performance
indicators. Performance indicators work only if baseline
information is available.
 If for some reason, baseline information about cost, schedule, or
quality could not be kept or is not accurate enough to be reliable,
these indicators do not work. It is because there is no accurate
planned data available against which the actual execution data
can be compared.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Monitor against Project Schedule:

 A project plan is generally a high-level plan for a project and it
does not include details like resource allocation to tasks, task
details, etc.
 A project schedule includes these things, and thus, project
schedule tracking and monitoring means measuring the
progress of tasks as well as evaluating the performance of
resources in the tasks on a daily basis.
 So while project plans are tracked at the milestone level, project
schedules are tracked at task level. Project schedule tracking
and monitoring may include information like resource utilization
percent, resource loading, task progress, etc.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Periodic Measurement:
 Projects are extremely dynamic and unpredictable in nature. It is
very important that project progress at task level is tracked and
measured very frequently to know if everything is progressing
well or if there are problems at any time.
 Actual measurements should be always compared with planned
figures, and if any deviations are found, a plan should be made
to fix these deviations.
 In good organizations, each project team member logs his daily
activity in a centralized project monitoring system.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Periodic Measurement:
 Reports from this kind of system can be used to track task
progress in terms of schedule.
 Example: For cost tracking, the project manager can make a
simple sheet and keep it updated with the number of hours the
resources have worked on the project tasks. Multiplying these
hours by their hourly pay rate will give the expense of each task.
If more than one resource is working on a task, adding expenses
for all the resources working on that task will give the figures of
expense of that task. You can then compare the actual expense
of the work done so far against the budgeted cost for that work.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Earned Value Management:

 For any project, specific time duration and specific budget are
allocated while making the project plan.
 In ideal conditions, execution of the project will be completed at
exactly the same time and at the same budget. In reality, this
never happens. Sometimes, the project may be completed
before the stipulated time duration or at less cost.
 But these cases are rare. Most often, the project overruns both
the time duration and cost. Large projects warrant huge budgets,
resources, and time.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Earned Value Management:

 It is very important that they are tracked and monitored closely,
and timely reports are given to the stakeholders so that they
know how the project is progressing.
 Their reputation and very often jobs are at stake based on the
success or failure of the project. So they must get timely status
reports about progress of the project.
 During reporting, if proper project monitoring information is not
communicated to the stakeholders, they may not know how the
project is progressing.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Earned Value Management:

 They may be reported only about the percentage of project
completion against planned schedule or about the percentage
of budget spent so far.
 But from this information, it is not clear if the project is actually
progressing as per plan or if it is lagging behind.
 This is because there is a third dimension that has not been
accounted in these calculations.
 This dimension is the volume of work performed over different
periods of time during the project are not the same.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Earned Value Management:

Project Monitoring Methodology

 Earned Value Management:

 As you can see in above figure, it is difficult to conclude whether
the project is progressing well or not as the actual schedule and
cost cannot be compared against any value.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Earned Value Management:

Project Monitoring Methodology

 Earned Value Management:

 With the above figure, the actual cost and schedule figures can actually
be compared against planned data.
 It is because this time, we are tracking the project progress using earned
value (EV).
 The project duration and the project budget are outlined at the beginning
of the project.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Earned Value Management:

 When the project execution starts, we will be recording actual project
progress in terms of budget and time consumed by project tasks.
 Based on the budget consumed by a task, task progress is measured
and we also record how much task progress should have been done
after consuming that much of budget. This is known as EV.
 So we have three values here: planned value (PV), EV, and actual
value (AV).
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Measure Resource Utilization:

 Resource utilization is a measure of efficiency with which
available resources within an organization are utilized in projects.
 Resource utilization is evaluated more frequently at program or
line of business level.
 For instance, suppose a software service company has a practice
division for application development services for financial services.
It has a total IT staff of 80 people. It has five projects running.
In these projects, a total of 76 people are engaged. That means
there are four people who are not assigned to any project. That
means this practice division has 95% of resource utilization.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Measure Resource Loading:

 Resource utilization in projects can be tracked using information
as to how many hours of project work is allocated to the
resource and how many hours of actual work the resource has
put in.
 So if a resource is allocated 20h of work and he actually puts in
25h of work, the resource utilization is 125%. From other points
of view, resource loading also comes into picture.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Measure Resource Loading:

 Suppose a task requires 20h to be completed. A resource
allocated to this task works 8h a day.
 So under normal loading conditions, he will finish this task in 2.5
days. Now suppose as per schedule, this task needs to be
completed in 2 days (16 h). In this situation, the resource can
only complete 80% of the work under normal loading conditions.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Measure Resource Loading:

 The project manager then has two choices: he can assign
additional resource to this task to complete it in 16h or he can
increase the workload of the existing resource.
 To complete this task within the schedule, the resource should
be loaded with 125% of workload.
 He may need to work some extra hours every day (overtime of
2h per day in addition to his 8h of regular work).
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Monitor Skills and Knowledge of Project Team:

 During project planning and detailed scheduling, resource
matching to project tasks is done.
 When there is some gap in required and available skills, a
training plan is made to bridge this gap.
 During execution, this training part is also to be tracked to
ensure that the planned training has been successfully
completed and that the resource who has received the training
now can do his task competently.
 Sometimes it may also happen that during planning, some tasks
and the required skills to do them are not properly planned.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Monitor Skills and Knowledge of Project Team:

 During execution, it is realized that training may be needed.
 In such cases, arrangement should be quickly made for training.
If there is a delay in starting that task, the project plan should be
adjusted accordingly.
 The additional time may either be taken from the schedule buffer
or be adjusted against any slack in the project schedule. One
more possibility may be regarding resource skills. Sometimes, a
resource may leave the project and the project may need to find
a replacement.
 In such a situation, the project manager may need to do
resource skills matching and find a suitable replacement
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Monitor Risks:
 Everything to be done in a project comes with a risk.
 If a software design is to be made, there is a risk that the design
is faulty.
 When doing software testing, there is a risk that the testing is not
good enough.
 When doing a particular project task, there is a risk that it may
not be completed on time due to resource shortage or
underestimation of the effort required for the task.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Monitor Risks:
 For each kind of risk that may arise, a contingency plan is
needed so that the project does not get affected.
 Risk identification has to be done and its impact and probability
has to be assessed at all times during the execution of the
project.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Monitor Issues:
 Several kinds of issues keep arising during the execution of the
project.
 These issues need to be addressed and solutions to be found
and applied so that project progress is not affected.
 There may be some doubts about the design for which a
developer needs a clarification.
 That clarification is to be provided on time so that the
developer’s time is not wasted.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Monitor Issues:
 All kinds of issues keep arising and the project manager needs
to resolve them satisfactorily and in time.
 Issues are time sensitive and thus require solution within a
certain time frame.
 But all issues are not same. Some have more impact on the
project while others do not have much of an impact.
 So if there is more than one issue at hand, then the project
manager should first analyze the impact and accordingly make a
list of issues with set priorities and assigning top priority to
resolve the issues that have most severe impact on the project.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Status Reports:
 The customer needs status reports to know whether the project
is progressing well or lagging behind in some respect.
 The project manager needs to prepare status reports and send
them to the customer. Generally, these status reports are sent
after completion of any milestone in the project.
 These milestones could be anything and could be set after
discussion with the customer. But most often, these milestones
denote completion of one phase of the project (requirements,
design, construction, testing, etc.).
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Status Reports:
 The status report should contain information about cost,
schedule, and quality as to how the project execution is faring
against the project plan.
 If the project is lagging behind in any of these aspects, then a
good explanation should be included as to why it happened.
 The report should also contain a remedy plan to put the project
on track.
Project Monitoring Methodology

 Status Reports:
 The report should also contain information regarding
achievements, challenges faced, and issues resolved during the
report period.
 Depending on the requirements of the customer, the report can
be detailed or succinct.
 Many project managers make a mistake of not making a
good rapport with the customer.
Project Control Techniques

 Resource Leveling:
 Resource leveling is one technique that is employed to resolve
resource conflicts during project execution.
 Sometimes, it so happens that a resource is to do more than one
task.
 Now it is found that one task will get delayed due to the delay in
the other task.
 If there is a slack found in the schedule, the other task that has
not started yet can be taken to some other time frame so that it
will not be affected due to delay in the first task.
 Or if this is not possible, then adding some more resources to
the task can resolve this issue.
Project Control Techniques

 Resource Leveling:
 When using software such as Microsoft Project for making the
project schedule, the software has tasks that conflict with other
tasks in the schedule.
 These conflicts could be due to impractical start or finish dates
for tasks, resource overallocation, or dependency of tasks on
each other (so that if the first task gets delayed, the other will
also get delayed).
 Adjusting those tasks manually or automatically will resolve the
conflict.
Project Control Techniques

 Resource Leveling:
Project Control Techniques

 Resource Leveling:
Project Control Techniques

 Schedule Optimization:
 Using PERT/CPM methods, we can determine the critical path of
the project. But before drawing the critical path, the project
manager should ascertain that there is no unnecessary slack in
the project plan.
 If there is any slack anywhere on the critical path, it should be
removed to make the project plan optimized.
 Similarly, as there could be many critical paths for the same
project plan, unnecessary slack on all paths should be identified
and removed.
 Now the longest path out of these will be the critical path for the
project.
Project Control Techniques

 Schedule Optimization:
 Schedule optimization can also be done during execution.
 If during execution, any task on the critical path is found to be
done earlier than planned, then the critical path can be shortened.
 This way schedule for the project can be collapsed or the extra
time available can be used for starting dependent tasks earlier
than planned schedule.
Project Control Techniques

 Schedule Optimization:
 One more technique of schedule optimization is to find if any
tasks can be put in parallel that are currently in sequence.
 This way the schedule can be collapsed by a big margin. Then
we can also optimize the schedule by checking if any task can
be split and then putting these split tasks in parallel so that the
schedule can be collapsed.
Project Control Techniques

 Schedule Optimization:
Project Control Techniques

 Corrective Actions against Deviations:

 From the project monitoring status reports, if it is observed that
the project is deviating from plan, then corrective actions are to
be taken by the project manager.
 For taking corrective action, the situation is to be analyzed and
root causes are to be identified.
 Once root causes are found, solutions to fix them can be thought
of and then action can be taken accordingly.
 It is also advisable to have a good measurement of all process-
and product-related attributes that are relevant to the project.
Good measurements will help in decision-making process.
Project Control Techniques

 Corrective Actions against Deviations:

 Some of the reasons for increased project cost include increase
in overhead (higher cost of procuring tools, infrastructure, etc.)
or salary.
 It could also be due to schedule overrun.
 So cost increases could either be schedule dependent or
schedule independent.
 If the cost increase is due to schedule overrun, then immediate
action should be taken to correct the schedule deviation.
Project Control Techniques

 Corrective Actions against Deviations:

 Schedule deviation (almost always overrun) can happen due to
faulty effort estimate, faulty scheduling, resource unavailability,
loss of critical resources midway in the project, requirement
creep, etc.
 Requirement creep is the most cited problem attributed to
schedule overruns. The best policy regarding requirement creep
is to bargain with the customer whenever any requirement
change request comes.
Project Control Techniques

 Corrective Actions against Deviations:

 The customer should be made aware of the consequences of
the change request in project schedule.
 Accept a change request only after the customer understands
and agrees on the consequences in the project schedule.
 Risks of resource unavailability or loss of resources pose a
serious threat for the project
Project Control Techniques

 Corrective Actions against Issues:

 Issues should be classified into many categories and top-priority
issues should be tackled first.
 Issues are also time-sensitive, and if they are not tackled in time,
they will impact the project.
 How severe the impact will be depended on the kind of the issue
itself.
 When many issues are in hand at a given time, it is difficult to
identify their priority. All of them seem important.
Project Control Techniques

 Corrective Actions against Issues:

 In such cases, it will be best to list them and put a weight against
each of them.
 Time sensitivity should also be considered (e.g., in how many
days the issue should be sorted out). Now sort out your list with
these two values against each issue.
 If an issue with more weight has a bigger time window and if an
issue with lower weight has a smaller time window, then if time
permits, both should be tackled in parallel so that both can be
resolved within their time windows
Project Control Techniques

 Corrective Actions against Issues:

 However, if the project manager does not have much time to
tackle both simultaneously, then it will be best to tackle the issue
with the higher weight. So if a lower-priority issue cannot be
resolved, it will not have much impact on the project, and at the
same time, a bigger impact on the project can be avoided by
resolving a higher-priority issue.
Project Control Techniques

 Resource Optimization:
 The project manager from the outsourcing company may have to
think about benefits to his organization from the project.
 During project execution, however, there are many factors that
threaten to eat into the profit margin.
 The project manager has to keep an eye on the expenses so
that profit margin could be kept intact.
 In this regard, one known source of threat is an increasing wage
of employees.
Project Control Techniques

 Resource Optimization:
 To handle this issue, the project manager may have to make
sure that productivity of the employees gets increased
commensurate with the hike in salaries.
 There are many practical ways of optimizing your resources in
projects.
 The best option is to use project portfolio management to utilize
your available resources to the best possible way.
 Project Control Techniques

 Resource Optimization:
 When you have a pool of resources and a list of projects, you
can staff the projects in such a way that your pool of resources
are utilized in such a way that no or least resources are sitting idle.
 Even within the pool of resources, some are costlier than others.
It definitely makes sense that time of these higher-paid staff should
be utilized to the maximum.
Project Monitoring and Control Artifacts

 Project monitoring provides project process and work product data

that we can use to make decision and control the project so that
later on it can be kept on track despite derailings in the past.
 The cost could have gone up from what was budgeted, the
schedule could have overrun, or the work product quality could have
gone down from what was expected.
 So basically we have three attributes of a project that should be
monitored and controlled: schedule, cost and quality. The artifacts
belonging to the schedule include PERT/CPM charts, network
diagrams, resource charts, EVM, etc.
Project Monitoring and Control Artifacts

 The artifacts belonging to cost include budget analysis, resource

optimization, EVM, etc.
 The artifacts for quality include requirement document review,
design document review, source code review, test cycle logs, etc.
 The most important artifacts of project monitoring and control are
actual project cost, product quality and schedule data.
 The overall project cost and schedule data in relation to project size
and quality level determines productivity on the project
Project Monitoring and Control in Iterative Model

 Most of the project risks are tackled by dividing the entire project
into small iterations.
 Thus, for iterative projects, the risks are manageable because their
sizes are reduced, and they are distributed throughout the project
by means of breaking the project into small iterations.
 However, sometimes it may happen that the customer demands
some drastic change in his requirements, which may force an
iteration to undergo a large change from the planned activities.
Project Monitoring and Control in Iterative Model

 In such cases, the project monitoring and control will be out of

control, and thus, the project plan (iteration plan) will become
invalid. A new project plan will have to be made.
 But in general, a project plan (or iteration plan) can be controlled
using typical controlling techniques. A good technique to control an
iteration is using a priority system for requirements or features.
 All the high-priority features will be completed in the iteration, and
the low-priority features can be kept as options if time permits in the
iteration.
Project Monitoring and Control in Iterative Model
Introduction to Project Closure

 A software project could be a software development, software

customization, software integration, software maintenance, or just
one phase of the software development lifecycle (requirements,
design, construction, or testing a software product).
 As per the contract, the final deliverables have to be handed over to
the customer before the project deadline.
 Before the closure of the project, you need to check if all
deliverables are going to be achieved before the set deadline.
Introduction to Project Closure

 The deliverables include the tested software product, user/training

manuals, user training, and installation/implementation of the
software product at client site. It may also include product release in
formation if the project is to develop a software product with many
iterations and is built incrementally.
 Do not forget that you need to keep a record of what happened
during the execution of the project.
 If your company has a software engineering group and data from all
projects that need to be kept in a central repository for statistical
process-control purposes, then you also need to make sure that all
relevant project data available before the closure of the project are
fed into this repository.
Introduction to Project Closure
Source Code Management

 Many versions of the source code get generated as requirements,

and designs get changed during the software development life
cycle.
 During testing, many bugs are discovered and they are fixed.
 The final source code thus has seen a lot of change, and which
version will be shipped to customer needs to be identified.
 The configuration management system should be kept up to date
with all source code changes.
Source Code Management
Project Data Management

 When an existing project comes to an end, it is very important to

archive project data.
 The archived data help in estimating effort, schedule, costs, and
quality level for new projects.
 This information is very valuable for new projects.
 Providing project data as a performance indicator to the customer
not only boosts customer confidence about ability of the project
team, but it also helps in increasing productivity, project goal clarity,
and reducing schedule and costs when future projects actually get
executed.
Project Data Management

 When you need to compare or use data, it should be clean and

relevant. So before sending project execution data into the
repository, it should be made sure that the data are clean.
 For any project, relevant data are the execution data from similar
projects. This similarity is in terms of project size, industry for which
the software product was made, programming language used,
lifecycle methodology used, etc.
 So the repository should be categorized accordingly. Depending on
these variations, there will be many different types of projects.
Project Data Management

 When a new project is to be initiated, the repository should be

searched for similar projects.
 Data from these projects can then be used for the new project. This
cleaned and filtered data then will be very much relevant for the new
project and thus will be extremely useful.
Project Data Management
Project Closure in Iterative Model

 The iterative development model is very popular in software product

development.
 Software vendors are always keen to launch new versions of their
software product in the opportunity time window lest the opportunity
is lost.
 This results in some problems on the software development front.
Iteration closure is often a messy affair if care and restraint are not
exercised.
 Due to market pressure, top management is under pressure to
incorporate all the requested features in the release.
 Project Closure in Iterative Model

 But it is clearly not feasible to do so.

 It is better to prioritize features based on market demand and effort
required to make them. So release planning should be a part of the
iteration planning at the beginning of the iteration.
 Features with high demand but requiring lesser effort should ideally
be included first in the iteration.
 If time permits, then go for adding another feature. Keep doing it
until you do not have any time left for adding any more features.
 Care should also be taken not to compromise on quality.