This is the 111th original article without water. If you want to get more original articles, please follow us on our official account. This article was first published on the cloud blog: What you Need to know about project management
preface
As a software development engineer, why do you need to know about project management? If you’re wondering, programmers should just write good code and not care about project management. In today’s increasingly saturated programmer industry, maintaining competitiveness is an eternal topic, and as one of the “soft skills” of programmers, project management knowledge can not only exercise your ability to organize, coordinate, communicate and cooperate, but also help you go wider and better on the technical road.
In our daily development, project management is everywhere, from requirements review, scheduling, development and alignment to the final release, but the more common research and development process, is actually a miniature version of the project management process, now we will from the perspective of programmers, briefly describes the basic knowledge of project management and a helpful method to practical work.
This article is suitable for beginners or have less than 3 years of work experience, want to understand the knowledge of project management, improve their soft skills, want to understand the needs of the complete process of research and development, better work and improve work efficiency of developers.
After reading this article, you will learn:
- Basic knowledge of project management, five process groups and complete process of requirement research and development;
- How to do requirement review well, and how to deal with requirement change;
- How to make schedule plan, common methods of work breakdown and risk identification;
- How to better carry out the work report, the significance and function of the daily morning meeting;
- How to make full preparations before going online and what work needs to be done after going online;
What is project management
First, let’s look at what a project is. A project is defined in the PMBOK® Guide as “temporary work undertaken to create a unique product, service, or outcome.” Projects are not repetitive work; each project is unique and therefore “unique”; A project has a start time and an end time, so it is “temporary work” and has defined scope and resources.
Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements. More specifically, planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, controlling and evaluating the whole process from the beginning of the investment decision to the end of the project to achieve the project objectives.
PMI (American Project Management Association) divides it into five project management process groups and ten knowledge areas, a total of 49 sub-processes.
The ten knowledge areas include integrated management, scope management, schedule management, cost management, quality management, resource management, communication management, risk management, procurement management, and related party management.
The five process groups are start-up, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure.
Below we will summarize the project management knowledge from the five process groups and combine them with actual work scenarios.
Big Five Process group
Our demand research and development process is actually the comparison of the five process group image.
Start-up process group
The project initiation process group includes identifying stakeholders and developing the project charter. Before starting a project, it is necessary to develop a project charter, which can be simply understood as a document that describes the project’s background, purpose, and ultimately what results are to be delivered. Another important thing is to identify related party, any of the content associated with the project, there must be a “person” the existence of project management requires people to participate in the project also need people, customers are at the same time, we can project related people here are collectively referred to as “parties”, in the early stage of the project to identify related party have a vital role for the success of the project.
How to do requirements review well?
In practical development, requirements review meeting can be regarded as the start of a project. Requirements review meeting will generally talk about background, purpose and requirements content, and it also needs to identify relevant parties during requirements review. Here, we will start with an upcoming “online reimbursement system” project. Before the development of the project, there will be a demand review. During the review process, we need to pay attention to the following issues:
- Are all business scenarios considered? In the early stage of development, careful thinking and analysis of requirements are needed to avoid omissions in order to minimize project risks.
- Does the partner have enough time? For example, when you don’t do stakeholder analysis, you roll up your sleeves and get to the end of the code and find that the feature dependent partner doesn’t have time to develop, there’s a risk that the project will be delayed.
Requirements review needs to be done:
- Fully understand the background and purpose of the requirement, reject the tool person;
- Analyze and inform relevant parties of requirements;
- Identify the scope of requirements and document them;
Planning Process Section
After a project is launched, the only thing to do is to make a plan, that is, to translate the scope of goals and requirements into a practical plan, and making a plan is the most important and complex part of the whole project process. The planning process group is involved in all 10 knowledge areas, which shows its importance. The planning process group can be likened to the scheduling plan and technical scheme review in the RESEARCH and development process. Only by making adequate preparations in the early stage can the project progress more smoothly.
Here we will focus on two things that are most useful for daily work: making a schedule and identifying risks.
Make a schedule
What is making a schedule? Schedule planning is the process of analyzing the sequence of activities, duration, resource requirements and schedule constraints, and creating a project schedule model to implement the project execution and monitoring.
Work breakdown structure WBS
How can it help you make a better schedule? Here we use a tool approach, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), which, as its name suggests, breaks down a large task into smaller activities.
In the actual scenario, we need to evaluate the workload before the development schedule. During the evaluation, we can use WBS to disassemble the work to make the final evaluation more accurate. Here we take the “online reimbursement system” mentioned above as an example to split the work through WBS:
Identify risks
No matter how simple and complex a project is, there will be risks. How to identify risks in a project can be considered from several dimensions.
Commonly used risk identification methods:
Brainstorming
It can be discussed by several group members in a normal, harmonious and unrestricted atmosphere in the form of a meeting, everyone can express their own ideas, we can inspire each other to get as many ideas as possible.
A SWOT analysis
SWOT analysis generally analyzes the risks of a project from the perspectives of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and then generates corresponding risk solutions.
Take the “online reimbursement system” mentioned above as an example to conduct SWOT analysis:
In our daily development process, there will be many risks. While completing the work at hand, we should also look at the problem from the perspective of PM. We can think from the following aspects:
- The interface depends on whether the interface can be provided on time
- Visual and interactive scripts are delivered on time
- Is the feasibility of the technical solution assessed in place
- Whether the affected areas are well considered
- Adequacy of relevant resources
Execution process group
Execution is basically “polish code”, but how to ensure that the end result is satisfactory and successful delivery is worth thinking about. The implementation link is not smooth sailing, may be doing doing suddenly found that the implementation of the scheme here is not feasible, it is possible to suddenly change the demand……
Prior to implementation, adequate planning and design should be done. During implementation, communication should be maintained with relevant parties by constantly monitoring the progress of requirements to ensure that the final results are in line with the delivery requirements.
In actual development, there are two things to focus on:
Requirements change
Requirements change will affect the schedule scope, and both multi-function and multi-function will affect the project schedule.
How to respond to changing requirements?
- Changes should not be blindly implemented. Any change may cause problems not taken into account and also affect the project schedule.
- Requirements change needs to be unified process and specification, any requirements change needs to be evaluated;
- To keep track of requirements, all requirements need to be recorded and updated in the platform for convenient demand management.
Smoking self-test
Self-testing is an important part of quality assurance. In the requirements research and development process, we need to conduct test analysis and review, and strictly implement smoke use cases to ensure that the final function points and compatibility tests can be covered.
Monitoring Process Group
The monitoring process is always around the whole project cycle, and the two complement each other to ensure the quality and quantity of the project. How can we better monitor the progress of the project? There are two important activities mentioned here, one is the work report and the other is the morning meeting.
The work report
Work report is a necessary document for project management to check the progress and status of the project.
In practical work, we also need to write daily, weekly or monthly reports. How can we let others clearly understand the status and progress of the project? Taking weekly reports as an example, we can write in the following aspects:
From a personal perspective, you need to include the following:
- How much work is done this week
- Work Plan for next week
- Problems and suggestions in work
Team perspective:
The difference between a team weekly and an individual weekly is that it is more focused on results and plans, because you represent the output of the entire team and need to be prioritized.
- Focus on business progress and risks
- Progress and risk of each line of business
- Work Plan for next week
Tables can also be used in the report to show the overall progress and risk.
Morning session
Many Internet companies or companies in traditional industries have the habit of holding morning meetings. Why to hold daily station meetings can be analyzed from the following perspectives:
Closure process group
Closeout is to close the project and to close the procurement. At the end of a project, organizational process assets should also be organized, including lessons learned registers, problem logs, etc. An important sign of closure is that the deliverables have been approved by the customer. How can we better ensure that the deliverables are up to the expected standard?
From the perspective of pre-launch, it is necessary to ensure the implementation of the above four process groups in place, including functional testing, making a good list of online, clarifying the functional points required, conducting visual and interactive inspection, and presenting to business parties and users. It is very important to do a good job of the work before the launch, so that the deliverable results can be guaranteed to customers.
After going online, we should always pay attention to alarms, review and summarize the project, and file materials.
conclusion
Through the understanding of the above process group, I believe that we have a preliminary understanding of project management knowledge, after having the knowledge of project management, we need to apply the knowledge to practice, and summarize experience in practice, to improve. Of course, I am also a beginner in project management, there are inevitably some wrong places in the article, please correct them and make progress together!
The resources
PMBOK® Guide, 6th edition
One Thousand and One Nights
Recommended reading
The most familiar stranger rC-form
How to build a build deployment platform suitable for your team
Let’s talk about Deno
Serverless Custom (Container) Runtime
Open source works
- Political cloud front-end tabloid
Open source address www.zoo.team/openweekly/ (wechat communication group on the official website of tabloid)
, recruiting
ZooTeam, a young passionate and creative front-end team, belongs to the PRODUCT R&D department of ZooTeam, based in picturesque Hangzhou. The team now has more than 40 front-end partners, with an average age of 27, and nearly 30% of them are full-stack engineers, no problem in the youth storm group. The members consist of “old” soldiers from Alibaba and netease, as well as fresh graduates from Zhejiang University, University of Science and Technology of China, Hangzhou Electric And other universities. In addition to daily business docking, the team also carried out technical exploration and practice in material system, engineering platform, building platform, performance experience, cloud application, data analysis and visualization, promoted and implemented a series of internal technical products, and continued to explore the new boundary of front-end technology system.
If you want to change what’s been bothering you, you want to start bothering you. If you want to change, you’ve been told you need more ideas, but you don’t have a solution. If you want change, you have the power to make it happen, but you don’t need it. If you want to change what you want to accomplish, you need a team to support you, but you don’t have the position to lead people. If you want to change the pace, it will be “5 years and 3 years of experience”; If you want to change the original savvy is good, but there is always a layer of fuzzy window… If you believe in the power of believing, believing that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things, believing that you can meet a better version of yourself. If you want to be a part of the process of growing a front end team with deep business understanding, sound technology systems, technology value creation, and impact spillover as your business takes off, I think we should talk. Any time, waiting for you to write something and send it to [email protected]
