Project Management

The software engineer and the project manager provide complementary skills and work collaboratively on shared activities. The three main activities of the project manager are organizational liaison, personnel management, and project monitoring and control. The "Liaison" section discusses the project manager's role as a go-between for the technical team and agents who are not members of the technical team (such as project sponsors, users, IS management, vendors, and so on).

In the "Personnel Management" section, you will learn that this job entails working with personnel and human resources to hire, fire, and provide employees with professional development.

The "Monitor and Control" section explains that project monitoring involves tracking project progress relative to budget. Project control means implementing changes when progress is not satisfactory (such as training or revising project plans).

Liaison

Project Sponsor

The sponsor pays for the project and acts as its champion. A champion is one who actively supports and sells the goals of the application to others in the organization. A champion is the 'cheerleader' for the project.

The goals of liaison with the champion are to ensure that he or she knows the status of the project, understands and knows his or her role in dealing with politics relating to the project, and knows the major problems still requiring resolution.

The major duty of the champion is to deal with the political issues surrounding the project that the project manager cannot deal with. Politics are in every organization, and politics relate to organizational power. Power usually is defined as the ability of a person to influence some outcome. One source of power comes from controlling organizational resources, including money, people, information, manufacturing resources, or computer resources.

Political issues of application development do not relate to the project, but to what the project represents. Applications represent change. Changes can be to the organization, reporting structure, work flow, information flow, access to data, and extent of organizational understanding of its user constituency. When changes such as these occur, someone's status changes. When status changes, the people who perceive their status as decreasing will rebel.

The rebellion may be in the form of lies told to analysts, refusal to work with project members, complaints about the competence of the project team, or any number of ways that hinder the change. If the person causing trouble is successful, the project will fail and his or her status will, at worst, be unchanged. Politics, left unattended, will lower the chances of meeting the scheduled delivery date and raise the risk of implementing incorrect requirements. The project manager usually tries to deal with the political issues first, keeping the sponsor informed of the situation. If unsuccessful, the sponsor becomes involved to resolve the problem.

In some organizations, the project manager communicates to the sponsor only through his or her manager. In others, the project manager handles all project communications. In general, treat the sponsor like your boss. Tell him or her anything that will cause a problem, anything they should know, and anything that will cause the project delays.