PROJECT MANAGEMENT

CASE STUDY Saturn software development hired a number of people to work on the Seleca Project and Tom was the Project Manager. The first new member of the team was Jannice who claimed to be a very skilled and experienced developer. Tom gave her a very simple task, to create a form with two simple controls and to bind it to the corresponding record in the database. Three days later she still had no progress and she told Tom that she still doesnt understand how to do the task. After some days Tom understood that she has no idea of software development. From that moment on Tom assigned her the simplest and the least important tasks. Next hire was Zoe who was a developer with some experience and with the great desire to learn and to improve. Zoe was really fast learning and soon she took responsibility on some of the programs modules. Tom was very proud of her for she understood the business logic very quickly and soon she was able to discuss some of the requirements with the customer. Soon the management assigned Frank who was already an employee but did not abide by companys rules nor the working hours. Tom could never be sure when he will come to work and how long he was going to stay. He used to come to work at noon and about 5 p.m. he will go home. It was common situation for Frank to submit code that would not compile and would break off the work of the other team members which impacted on their productivity. At some point the first increment of the product was given to the customer to get their feedback and better requirements for the next increment because we didnt have clear requirements during the whole life of the project. Soon after Tom realized that nobody in the customers office was using the product. After interviewing them, Tom learnt that they were not happy with the first increment and wanted to change requirements for the first increment.

Questions :

1. Identify five project management mistakes that affected the Seleca project. Quote from the case study the sentence which outlines each mistake. Categorise each of the mistake identified into people, process, product or technical.

2. You have been asked to formulate a work breakdown structure (WBS) to produce a software development plan for the Seleca project. Using your knowledge of project planning, draw a WBS consisting of process and deliverables for the development plan. Your WBS diagram should include at least three levels and at least five groups of deliverables.

3. Tuckman model of team development consists of five stages, explain the following three stages of the model: Norming, Storming and Adjourning