Software Project Management Primer – Course overview
Get a head-start in the race to becoming a competent PM! Fast forward project management competency development by 2 years!!
Foundations of Software Project Success (FSPS) course serves as a primer for software project management. The course teaches software project management basics to future and new project managers and .
What is FSPS?
FSPS is a software project management primer that is meant for future PMs and New PMs. It provides an overview of the complete landscape of project management andgives them a head start in their career as PMs. The course teaches the participants the best practices to handle common challenges of project management. The target audience are software professionals with 3 – 6 years of industry experience, who are likely to take on a PM role in next 1 year or already practicing PMs with less than 1 year project management experience.
Why FSPS?
Does programming, designing and architecting automatically make one a good project manager? NO!
Software professionals spend time in programming, design and other software engineering tasks before they become team leads or project managers. The software engineering activities don’t necessarily gear up a professional to become a sound PM as Project management is a different ball-game and demands a different set of competencies and the future or new PM would not have had opportunity to learn project management through experience and this course an excellent substitute for this experience. The course fast-tracks the learning curve of the PM and teaches practices that the PM has to otherwise learn by hard experience in about 2 years!!
Coverage of FSPS course
The FSPS course covers the complete gamut of software delivery excellence at different levels of depth. The above diagram provides an idea of what topics are covered at what depth. And the table of content below provides more details about the course coverage:
| # | Session name | Session description |
| Day 1 | ||
| 1 | Introduction | Defining success for a software project, and listing the major hurdles for achieving success |
| 2 | Project landscape | Walk-through of life cycle of a development project, over view of CMMi and PMBoK of PMI |
| 3 | Analysis of project hurdles | Analysis as to what extent CMM and PMBoK can help projects succeed, what are their limitations, and listing the challenges that demand advanced practices over and above CMM and PMBoK |
| 4 | Advanced practices | |
| 4.1 | Project planning best practices | Leveraging the life cycle for project success, Team skill building best practices, Reuse – when it can be a boon and when a bane, Work allocation best practices. |
| 4.2 | Requirements best practices | The CMM v/s Agile debate on requirement stability, Why requirements change – research findings, multiple levels of maturity in requirements management, degrees of freedom in requirements management. |
| Day 2 | ||
| 4.3 | Estimation best practices | Trends in estimation, simple techniques that participants can apply when they get back to work in order to improve accuracy of estimates. |
| 4.4 | Scheduling and project monitoring | Why schedules become unused after some time? Step-by-step procedure to create a good schedule that can be used for project monitoring. Best practices in schedules. |
| 4.5 | Other project best practices | Risk management, testing best practices, team building best practices, design best practices. |
| 4.6 | Game plan according to project context | Understanding and analyzing project drivers, constraints, degrees of freedom based on certain parameters. Selection of basic and advanced best practices based on the project context |
| 5 | Conclusion | Putting it all together…defining the project success landscape with CMM, PMBoK, advanced practices put together into a single framework. Challenges that still remain despite the framework and futuristic trends. |
Benefits of the course
The covers more than 25 best practices at deep level with hands-on. At the end of the workshop, the participants would
- Gain an end-to-end perspective of project management,
- Be able to carry out realistic estimates,
- Manage requirements well,
- Plan and track projects efficiently and
- Use many other best practices in scheduling, team leadership, risk management etc .