MODULE : SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLEASE HELP ON ALL QUESTIONS THANKS

Question 1 Mike is the project manager for GigaSafe (a medical insurance company) and got funding for the GigaQuote program (automating medical insurance quotes). Mike had written the proposal for the Giga-Quote program, a client server program and to be developed over a year. But when he met his boss Bill, he learnt that there were revisions in the proposal. The executive committee wants to be able to transfer the field quotes into the mainframe computer automatically. And the completion date was changed from March 1 to November 1, which shrinks the schedule to 6 months. The positive thing is that the committee approved the budget and 36 staff-months. Mike can also recruit anyone he would like to work on the project and increase the team size too. So Mike got together with Carl, a project technical lead, and they looked for ways to shorten the schedule. One solution was to use C++ and object-oriented design. Carl also knew of a report-building tool that was supposed to cut development time in half. The project had a lot of reports, so those two changes would get them down to about nine months. They were due for newer, faster hardware, too, and that could shave off a couple of weeks. If he could recruit really top-notch developers, that might bring them down to about seven months. Mike met Bill to inform him, but the boss told him that he has to get it down to six months. Mike decided to hire couple of sharp contractors for the project. Then they started to work according to the plan, two weeks filling in the gaps for the specification. Then they'd spend six weeks on design. They came up with a design that seemed to make a good use of C++'s features. The project hadn't been entirely smooth. Neither Jill nor Tomas liked Chip, and Sue had also complained that he wouldn't let anyone near his code. Nevertheless, by early August, they reported that they were between 85 and 90-percent done. In mid-August, the actuarial department released the rates for the next year, and the team discovered that they had to accommodate an entirely new rate structure. They had been counting on just plugging some new numbers into a ratings table. But they had to change the input dialogs, database design, database access, and communications objects to accommodate the new structure. On December 5, the GigaQuote team handed off the feature-complete GigaQuote program to testing. Two days later, Stacy released the first bug list and in two days, the testing group had identified more than 200 defects in the Giga-Quote program including 23 that were classified as 'Severity 1'-'Must Fix'-errors. Mike called a staff meeting for eight o'clock the next morning. The developers were touchy. They said that although there were a few serious problems, a lot of the reported bugs weren't really bugs at all but were misinterpretations of how the program was supposed to operate. After the meeting, Chip told Mike that he had accepted a contract with a different company that started February 3.Mike got Kip, the programmer who had been responsible for the mainframe side of the PC-to-mainframe communications, reassigned to help out on the project and assigned him to fix bugs in the PC communications code. After struggling with Chip's code for a week, Kip realized that it contained some deep conceptual flaws that meant it could never work. Kip was forced to redesign and re-implement the PC side of the PC-to-mainframe communications link. The program was finally completed by June.

(a) Identify five project management mistakes that affect the Giga-Quote project. Categorise each of the mistake identified into people, process, product or technical. [5 marks]

(b) Explain four primary planning steps that a project manager needs to follow to produce a planning document. [4 marks]

(c) Briefly describe the types of plan that could have been prepared by the software project manager for the Giga-quote project and how problems mentioned in the case study could have been tackled by these plans. [4 marks]

(d) Explain the difference between process and product WBS. [2 marks]

(e) Draw a hybrid Work-Breakdown Structure for the Giga-Quote Project. Your WBS should include at least 3 levels and at least 10 Activities/Tasks. [5 marks]