Planned and Unplanned Adjustments/Actions

1
Planned and Unplanned Adjustments/Actions

• Taking actions with a sense of urgency is
  important
• sets a tone as a project manager
• responsible
• care
• committed
• Sequence of 6 mini-actions (steps) within the
  adjustment process
• clarify, understand, and clearly state the
  problem (important step)
• communicate the problem while working on
  potential solution(s)
• gain necessary agreement for the chosen
  solution
• act on the solution
• communicate on the action(s) taken
• report on the resolution status

2
Planned Adjustments

• Anticipatory within a software process that
  includes
• Prototype - and make necessary Changes
• Reviews - and make correctional Changes
• Test - and make correctional Changes
• Consider a simple set of activities, where would
  you have built-in, planned changes? --- and why?
• Requirements
• Design
• Code
• Test
• Integration

3
Planned Adjustments

• The goal is NOT to have big surprise make
  adjustments that are
• incremental
• small
• Three basic attributes should be visited, but
  with planned, incremental adjustments
• Functionality
• Resource(s)
• Schedule
• Example
• bringing in additional resources (tool or
  people) for a later phase that was caused by an
  incremental change in the previous phase.

4
Special Planned Adjustments Example

• Quality (mostly defects) Attribute
• not compromisable but changeable
• Planned lessening of functionality but not
  delivering a defective function
• Non-Context Sensitive Help or no Help at all
• Less important vertical and separable functions
  (horizontal functions are cross product and
  harder to separate)
• Less nice to have vertical functions
• Shorter error messages with less error reason or
  recovery hints
• Planned increase in schedule
• Planned increase in resources

5
Planned (anticipated) Adjustments Risks

• Should be listed as potential risks
• Protoyyping
• Reviews/inspections
• Testing
• Mitigation would have been
• Buffered resource
• Buffered schedule
• Low commitment on requirements

6
Unplanned Adjustments/Actions

• Mostly responding to unanticipated and often
  large in size problem that impacts one of the
  three main attributes
• Schedule
• Resource(s)
• Functionality (requirements)

7
Functionality Impact

• Consider the amount of increase or decrease to
• resources
• schedule
• Consider the inter-relationship of resource and
  schedule (e.g.) more functionalitygt more
  schedule --- but how about resources ?
• adding resources may further expand schedule!
  (perhaps change of resources ?)
• The timing of change
• lesser impact during earlier phases
• the later phases impact may cause large
  adjustments
• causes re-do of all the earlier activities
  related to the change
• increase or modify planned, downstream activities
  

Watch out for internal scope creep of functions
8
Resource impact

• Consider the amount of increase or decrease to
• schedule
• functionality
• Consider the interrelationship of schedule and
  functionality (e.g.) less resources gt more
  schedule but how about functionality ?
• taking out functionality or partially completed
  functionality may cause more work and lengthen
  the schedule even more (minimally needs retest
  of previously working parts)
• Timing of Type of Change makes a difference
• more impact on key resources e.g. 1) losing
  key designer during design stage or 2) heavy
  system downs during coding/debugging or
  functional test phases

Watch out for late additions of resource --- may
slow you down more
9
Schedule Impact

• Very, very rarely do we have an elongation of
  schedule most likely it is shortening of
  schedule
• Consider the amount of increase or decrease to
• resources
• functionality
• Consider the inter-relationship of resources and
  functionality (e.g.) less time gt more other
  resources (mostly people) less functions?)
• adding resources that need training can further
  impact time and functionality (possibly perform
  some in-depth CPM trade-offs)
• adding resources with correct knowledge/skill
  may even net more functions
• Consider the timing
• Early phases of software development can handle
  schedule shortening easier
• Well planned testing may be handled in parallel,
  allowing schedule shortening

Some tasks can not be shortened ---- no possible
overlapping
10
Inter-Related 3-main Project Attributes
Functionality
Schedule
Resources
A push on any one vertex may re-shape the
triangle