Software Architect roles and responsibilities

Most of the organizations expect the technical role needs to play by project manager. The project manger has to be good in technical concepts to design the application and helping the team on problem solving.

Based on my experience, in this article I have presented the important points to be focused during designing the application by project manager who is expected to play a role of an architect:

Estimate the agile project's budget using story points

The budget of the project calculated mostly based on the effort. In agile projects the budget can be calculated based on story point also. The project manger needs to have clear input on the velocity of the team to calculate the budget.

Project Budget = Cost per Story Point * Total Story Points

Cost per story point = Cost of resources based on the effort spent / Story points per week

Assume you have team size of 8 with the rate of 80$ per hour.
The total working hours spent by person per week is 40 hours.
Total cost per week = 8 (team size) * 80 (rate in $) * 40 (hours/week) = 25,600$
Assume based on the velocity, you team able to complete 16 user stories.
Cost per story point = 25,600 (Cost of resources based on the effort spent) / 16 (Story points per week)
                                      =  1,600 $
Assume you have 500 story points planned for the project.

Project Budget = 1,600 * 500 = 8,00,000 $

What’s New in PMBOK Guide, 5th Edition

Are you ready for the newest guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge? PMI is poised to release the new version of the PMBOK Guide before the end of 2012.

I have highlighted what’s new in PMBOK5 compare with PMBOK4 below:
Total numbers of process in PMBOK4 are 42.
Total numbers of process in PMBOK5 are 47, the Project Stakeholder Management knowledge area has been added newly.

How to monitor and control projects

Monitoring and Controlling is the largest and continuous part of the project management. It keeps eye on everything that’s happing in/out of the project and adjusts as needed.  
A good project manager is constantly monitoring every single thing happing in the project. If you find the problem latter it’s hard and more expensive to solve it.
The below practices need to be followed by a project manager for an effective monitor and control of the project:

Negative Stakeholder Management

There are positive and negative stakeholders in every project (according to PMBOK). Positive ones will benefit from project implementation, for example their work will become more effective, more automated, easier, and more fun. At the same time negative stakeholders will have problems once the project is implemented. For example, they will be fired because their job will be done by new software.

Importance of Non Functional Requirements

The functional requirements are day-to-day requirements which business users and stakeholders needs in the product.

It is important to consider the other requirements also; these are called “Non-Functional Requirements” and fits into the organization's operational environment. This is the obvious requirements that your business users may not think about it.

Agile Risk Management

 The agile risk management and the process is the similar to the traditional risk management. (Refer risk management). The process integrates into the life cycle and the frequency of running varies considerably in the agile.

Problem Solving Skills

Problem Solving is one of the key personalities of the project manager or the any individuals.
The experience and approach for solving the problem varies from person to person.
I would like to share my experience of skills needs to be developed, how to differentiate the problems and method to solve the problem.

WBS template download

The project managers need to use the correct template for the WBS and constantly improve for the project success.

I have prepared the WBS for different projects like waterfall, production support, enhancements and others.
To download sample WBS click on sample WBS link or download from the Article Download section in the right side of the blog site.



The following are few guidelines from my side to improve the WBS.

• Involve the people who will be doing the work.
• Take the lesson learnt from the previous projects.
• Keep your WBS updated to reflect the changes.
• Ensure the milestones are captured and tracked.

Release and Deployment Approaches

Release and Deployment Approaches:

Release management is responsible for planning, scheduling and controlling the movement of new or changed services in the form of a release packages, to both the testing and the live production environments.

Any new system will bring about change in the structure of the client’s organization. However, users don't always welcome change. A degree of resistance to organizational changes is normal. The project manager's biggest challenge is guiding the client through the necessary changes. The release and deployment approach are:

Program Management

Program Management is the discipline of managing a group of interdependent projects. In management’s hierarchical structure, program management comes between project management and project portfolio management.

Manage changes in your project

Perform Integrated change control is the process of reviewing all change requests, approving changes, managing the changes to the deliverables, organizational process assets (OPA), project management and project management plan.

Project Performance management

Project Performance management is used to track an organization’s progress against its strategic plan and specific performance goals. While Performance Measures can be applied to individual projects to ensure that deadlines are met and costs are controlled, etc., it is essential for the Project Manager to understand how the project itself supports the organization’s strategy, and how the project will impact or influence the organization’s key Performance Measures.
It’s happened to nearly every project manager sometime in their career. They’re given the requirement to provide detailed performance reporting on a project and end up spending most of their time entering hours worked into work packages in Microsoft Project and estimating percent complete on these packages – on a daily basis. Whether the requirement for that level of reporting was real or perceived, the project manager finds that he’s unable to manage the day to day activities of his project because he’s too busy trying to measure the project’s performance.

Top 10 Success Factors for Managing Project

It might be difficult to define the success of the project.              

You'd think that delivering what the client wants on time and on budget would be considered success and it would, but there are other ways to achieve a successful outcome. Each client will have their own idea of success. One client may be willing to sacrifice features for a quicker delivery, another may be happy to extend the timeline to add in additional features. In both cases, the client gets what they want and the project is considered a success. In both cases, the project did not deliver on time, on budget with agreed functionality. This is where we need to start thinking outside the square.

Applying below simple techniques will help you avoid many common problems that befall many project managers:

Project Management Office (PMO)

PMO definition as per PMP:

A PMO is an organized body or entity assigned various responsibilities related to the centralized and coordinated management of those projects under its domain.

Why you need PMO?

Inter personal skills of Project Manager

The “Interpersonal skills” also known as “Soft Skills” of the project manager make big difference in the project to build the team to improving the competencies, team interaction, and team environment and to achieve the goal of the project.

Inter personal is the important tool in the “Develop Project Team” process in the “Project Human Resource Management” knowledge area as per PMP.

Project Cost Estimation and Control

Project Cost Estimation and Control:

The cost estimation of the project involves estimate costs and control costs.

The below tutorial provides the example of cost estimation, monitoring and forecasting for the project.

The effort estimation, over head costs, software's and hardware's cost are not covered.

Use Case Point Estimation

Use Case Point Estimation:

Use case modeling is a popular and widely used technique for capturing and describing the functional requirements of a software system.

The designers of UML recommend that developers follow a use case driven development process where the use case model is used as input to design, and as a basis for verification, validation and other forms of testing.

A use case model defines the functional scope of the system to be developed. The functional scope subsequently serves as a basis for top-down estimates.

An important prerequisite for applying a use case based estimation method is that the use cases of the system under construction have been identified at a suitable level of detail and the division of the functional requirements into the use case. The use case model may be structured with a varying number of actors and use cases. These numbers will affect the estimates.

Risk Management

Risk is the net negative impact of the exercise of a vulnerability, considering both the probability

and the impact of occurrence.

Risk management is the process of identifying risk, assessing risk, and taking steps to reduce risk to an acceptable level.

Not all the risks are negative. Some events (like finding an easier way to do an activity) or conditions (like lower prices for certain materials) can help your project! When this happens, we call it an opportunity… but it’s still handled just like a risk.

As per PMP the project risk management process are:

Conflict management

While no single definition of conflict exists, most definitions seem to involve the following factors:

That there are at least two independent groups, the groups perceive some incompatibility between themselves.

It’s probably no surprise that over half of conflicts come from priorities, schedules, and people. That’s why so many of the processes are focused on preventing conflicts.

Ground rules, good planning practices, and pretty much anything that has to do with communication are all there to prevent the most common reasons that conflicts happen.