Monitoring

1
Monitoring Controlling Projects

• Do you know whats happening in the project?

2
Lecture Objectives

• To describe the monitoring and controlling
  activities in a software project
• To understand the problems that needs to be
  controlled in a software project
• To discuss the important issues affecting the
  level of control in a project

3
Some Relevant Questions

• Are your projects working according to the plans
  submitted?
• How do you know?
• If there are problems where the actual work is
  not according to plan, can you find these problem
  areas and correct them?
• What was wrong in the initial plan?
• Can you ensure that next project the problems
  would not be repeated?

4
Definitions

• Monitoring is collecting, recording reporting
  information concerning any aspect of project
  management
• Controlling uses the data supplied by monitoring
  to bring actual performance closer to planned
  performance
• Evaluation is the judgment about quality
  effectiveness of project management

5
Feedback Loop
Adjustments
Feedback
Variance Reports
Results
Action
Plan
6
What Must Be Monitored and Controlled?

• Performance
• Quality
• Cost
• Time
• It is a common practice to focus monitoring
  activities on data that are easily gathered
  rather than importance

7
Stages

• Performance criteria, standard data collection
  procedure should be established
• Identify information that need to be collected
• Collect data
• Prepare report
• Update plans, charts tables

8
Features

• Monitoring can maintain high morale
• Variations should be highlighted
• Honesty unbiased reporting is important

9
Problems

• Poor interface correspondence
• Reasons for variations
• Threat vs benefit
• Units
• Level of details
• Others

10
Control vs Risk
Total Cost

Risk
Control
11
Control vs Risk Considerations

• High Control - Low Risk
• Risk reduced when more controls
• More controls will incur higher costs
• Low Control - High Risk
• Low control will allow more problems to occur
• Achieving Balance
• Project manager need to put adequate control and
  have a manageable level of risk

12
References

• Software Engineering A Practitioners Approach
  5th Ed. by Roger S. Pressman, Mc-Graw-Hill, 2001
• Software Engineering by Ian Sommerville,
  Addison-Wesley, 2001