Uniqueness of Software Project Management

There are different types of Project management; construction, health care, engineering, energy, IT etc. No matter which field you want to get involved in, it’s best to know the uniqueness of that type of project management.
Software project management process is concerned primarily with the production aspect of the software. Software development processes run in a similar way to general project management processes however, there are some peculiarities.
Why software project management is unique
Not all projects are the same, the differences when managing a software project is so due to its distinct life-cycle processes. 
These 4 areas make software project management unique.

• Process methodology: So still we have the project management life cycle or process management groups in the project life cycle like the initiating, planning, the monitoring and controlling and indicating and the closing and here is the bottom part where the process methodology could be different. Because it depends upon the type of software development that’s occurring. Some depending upon the software development or software being generated there is the traditional waterfall method, there is a rapid application development method as well as iterative web development and there are many more. But in this area depending upon what software is being generated, depends upon what process methodology is used. So this is where the change occurs. So it’s the software development life cycle, the project management process groups and the life cycle is still the same because remember, we are producing the project management deliverables here and the product is the software deliverables here.

• Resources: In this case, human resources, specifically the software developers. Depending upon what type of software is being created, there are the creative types, the right brain people and the analytical, the more left brain. Because depending upon what type of software could be more of an engineering type or it could be graphic design but regardless we have the right brain and left brain resources on our project so we manage them differently because the creatives have to have a creative outlet. They like creating. They have their own process and definitely the analytics have a different one. So recognizing the type of resources that you have on your project so you can manage them differently. 
• Constraints and risk: There are, and usually on software development projects there are different types of software that are occurring at the same time. There are operating systems that the applications are built on, there is firmware, there is application software itself and these contingent are critical software components constantly have new releases, new versions of the software or any kind of bugs or bug fixes that you constantly have to monitor and track because you don’t want to build your application software on like an old operating system. And many times when this is occurring, the team and the project manager have to watch for the different types of software to make sure that they are staying in line with the current version or release.
• Quality of metrics: So software projects are hard to measure sometimes because some organizations do not have a mechanism in place to track their defects so they don’t know how to measure the success or the quality of the project. So the defects need a systematic way to measure and track the defects occurring on the project so they can get those back in line.

When managing a software project, if you give extra-special attention to these areas it’s less likely that you’ll find yourself unprepared when changes happen, and changes always happen.
 

Written by Adejumoke Akinrele