Exercise Projects in Computing and Information Systems A Student's Guide 0273721313 Pearson 2009

4.1 Introduction 61 Although commercial projects have budgets associated with them, it is unlikely that you will have any real budget to manage. Some institutions do provide small budgets for student projects for example, to purchase hardware, software, books or perhaps travel to visit clients but normally it will be your supervisor or client who will be responsible for this issue. Figure 4.1 goes on to show how these ‘inputs’ are used to produce the project’s product. The project itself consists of two main activities – project management activi- ties the focus of this chapter and product development activities. Project management activities are concerned with planning how you will undertake your project, control- ling your project as it is progressing, checking your progress, meeting milestones, monitoring deliverables and managing risk. Product development activities are in- volved with the actual project work itself; for example, developing a program, writing reports, literature searching, meeting clients, quantitative research, qualitative research and seeing your supervisor – in other words, everything you need to do to complete your particular project successfully. Generally speaking, project management activities should take no more than around 10 of your overall effort on the project. Many students do not stick to this principle and spend many hours planning and re-planning the minutiae of their project, rather than getting on with the real task in hand. Their projects might be well planned and controlled but they leave themselves insufficient time to pursue a worthy project. You should be aware that the 10 effort you put into your project’s management is not distributed evenly throughout the life span of the project. You will spend a lot of project management effort towards the start of your project planning how you will perform it, and less effort, as the project continues, actually controlling it. The final stage of the project process in Figure 4.1 shows the outcome from the project – the project’s product – i.e., the artefact that is finally assessed. This will prob- ably be a report of some kind, a thesis or dissertation, a presentation, perhaps a fully documented computer program and an associated user guide and demonstration, a new model or algorithm, a literature survey, a case study, etc. There are two aspects to this ‘product’ – it will have a certain scope what it covers, what it does – i.e., what it achieves and a certain level of quality how well it does it. These are two aspects of your project over which you have control. You can, for example, reduce the scope of your product in order to improve its quality. Alternatively, you may want to cover more aspects in your report, or include more functionality in your program at the pos- sible expense of quality. This is a difficult trade-off to make and is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.

4.1.3 The project’s stages

From a project management perspective, all projects progress through five main stages during their lifetime; from the time the project is established as an initial idea to the time the project is finally completed. These stages apply to all kinds of projects; from your own academic computing project to large industrial projects spanning several years. At this level of detail specific activities that might be unique within academic computing projects are not of interest. We are interested in the broader stages in which project activities are performed. Each of these stages requires managing in one way or