CS615 Assignment 5 Solution 2011


Software Project Management
Assignment # 05
Spring 2011
                                                               Marks: 20
Due Date
Your assignment must be uploaded before or on 27th June 2011.

Uploading instructions:

Please view the Assignment Submission Process document provided to you by the Virtual University for uploading assignments.

  • Assignment should be in .doc format.
  • Save your assignment with your ID (e.g. bx020200786.doc).
  • Assignment submission through email is highly discouraged.

Rules for Marking:

It should be clear that your assignment will not get any credit if:
·         The assignment is submitted after due date.
·         The submitted assignment file is corrupted.
·         The assignment is copied.
Note:
Your answer must follow the below given specifications. You will be assigned zero marks if you do not follow these instructions.
·          Font style: “Times New Roman”
·          Font color: “Black”
·          Font size: “12”
·          Bold for heading only.
·          Font in Italic is not allowed at all.
·          No formatting or bullets are allowed to use.

Assignment:

                                    
                               
                                  Q.No.1



Download the article “Bridging the gap between software product management
And software project management” from the following link:

http://vulms.vu.edu.pk/Courses/CS615/Downloads/Bridging%20the%20gap%20between%20software%20product%20management%20and%20software%20project%20management.pdf

Or login to your LMS and go to “Downloads” tag to download it.

After reading the articles you have to give answer to the following question:

Q.No.1 Based on the discussion in the given paper explain the relationship between project management and product management.


Note: write answer in your own words, copied from the given article or from friend will be awarded zero.




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READING MATERIAL 


Bridging the gap between software product management 
and software project management 
Christina Manteli 
Department of Information and 
Computing Sciences 
PO Box 80.089, 3508TB Utrecht,  
The Netherlands 
manteli@cs.uu.nl 
Inge van de Weerd 
Department of Information and 
Computing Sciences 
PO Box 80.089, 3508TB Utrecht,  
The Netherlands 
i.vandeweerd@cs.uu.nl 
Sjaak Brinkkemper 
Department of Information and 
Computing Sciences 
PO Box 80.089, 3508TB Utrecht,  
The Netherlands 
s.brinkkemper@cs.uu.nl 


ABSTRACT 
This  paper presents an empirical research to the relations and 
dependencies between the fields of software product management 
and software project management in product software companies. 
By carrying out interviews and an online survey, we answer 
several current business issues on the leadership roles of product 
and project managers within the organizational structure, and 
provide a definition of software products and software projects 
based on their dependencies. 
Keywords 
Software product management, software  project management, 
software development, product software 
1.  INTRODUCTION AND RESEARCH 
APPROACH 
Quite few attempts have been made so far [e.g. 1, 2, 3] to distinct 
between software product management and software project 
management. Within software product companies, both fields play 
a vital role in the organization and coordination of their activities 
and processes [4, 5]. The related activities and processes do not 
only deal with the development of the software product but also 
with the overall organization of the company's market strategy, 
the product portfolio management, the launch preparation of the 
product as well as the customers’ support and communication 
efforts before and after sales [6, 7, 8, 9]. 
The success of product management and project management 
activities is dependent on the way companies organize and 
coordinate software product management and software project 
management together [10]. Therefore, the main research question 
focuses on:  What is the relationship between software product 
management and software project management within the context 
of an independent software vendor?  The initial purpose is to 
formalize that relationship with the construction of a theoretical 
framework. 
The research conducted is a theory-oriented research and it 
consists of two main parts; a theory-building (or exploratory) 
research and a theory testing research [11]. The theory building 
methodology is qualitative in nature and is based on a literature 
review of previous researches as well as on six semi-structured 
interviews among six Dutch software product companies. During 
the theory testing, a quantitative analysis is performed upon data 
that have been gathered through an online survey among 39 
respondents. The respondents were mainly project and product 
managers as well as product management experts.  
Combining the interviews and the survey, the research uses a 
data triangulation approach, which refers to the data evaluation 
through multiple sources of information [11]. This also addresses 
the problems of construct validity since the multiple sources of 
evidence provide essential measures of the same problem domain 
[12]. 
2.  THEORY BUILDING AND THEORY 
TESTING 
During the theory building part, the building blocks of the 
research are constructed. First, the definition of the scope of a 
software product and a software project will enable a more 
concrete examination of the relationships between these two 
terms. In order to examine the relationship between product 
managers and project managers, several aspects  that influence 
their collaboration should be taken into consideration.  
A software management framework that includes the 
aforementioned concepts is presented in Figure 1. To define the 
scope of the concepts, we broke down the overall aims (or 
requirements) of the product and the project into a number of 
smaller, more closely defined goals [13]. In addition, the role-
specific characteristics and role positioning of product managers 
and product managers are added. 

2.1  Results 
First, the participants were asked to indicate the degree of 
influence between the independent variables (time, quality, and 
cost) to the dependent variables (market success, customer 
satisfaction, and business goals). The overall means are 
summarized in Table 1. We can see that the respondents agree that 
quality has a higher influence on the market success of a software 
product and its customer satisfaction than time and budget 
(p=0.00). These factors can also be described as the external 

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for 
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are 
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that 
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy 
otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, 
requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. 
Conference’10, Month 1–2, 2010, City, State, Country. 
Copyright 2010 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0010…$10.00. 
 aspects of the software product and in general there seems to be a 
tendency in software product companies, to attribute more value 
on the delivered quality 
Table 1. Software product and software project results 
Market Success 
Time  Quality  Cost 
3.77  4.18  3.88  
Customer Satisfaction 
Time  Quality  Cost 
3.49  4.59  3.05 
Business Goals 
Time  Quality  Cost 
3.79  3.56  3.72 

Looking at the role-specific qualifications of product managers 
and project managers, we found several significant relations. First, 
the skills orientation of product and project managers within a 
software product company is related not only to the qualifications 
that characterize each one of the two roles but also to the 
communication between them. Based on the results of both the 
interviews and the online survey, there is a tendency for product 
managers to be more business oriented (focusing on managerial 
skills, communications and leadership qualifications) and for 
project managers to be more technical oriented (having a more in 
depth knowledge of software engineering and software 
programming).  
Secondly, the results have also shown that the greater the gap 
between business and technical skills of the two roles, the less 
successful the communication between them within the company. 
This means that, despite the above skills orientation, both roles 
need to understand each other in order to communicate and work 
together in the most efficient way. Consequently, hat both product 
and project managers need to possess both business and technical 
skills.  
In addition, the survey results showed that product managers are 
involved with significantly higher levels of decision-making 
(Strategic) whereas the project managers are more into the every 
day, and short-term decisions (Operational). Working together, 
both product and project managers are involved into the tactical 
decisions which concern a more mid-level spectrum of the 
organizational goals. This pattern seems to be perceived as a 
successful solution, which enables a better collaboration between 
product and project managers.   
Finally, the departmental positioning and the hierarchical 
relationship were examined not only as an organizational matter 
but also as a factor that can influence the relationship between 
product and project managers. It was suggested that the further 
apart the two roles are positioned, that is, the more levels in 
between both horizontally and vertically in the organizational 
structure, the greater the communication gap between them. 

Figure 1. Software Management Conceptual Model 
3.  CONCLUSION AND FURTHER 
RESEARCH 
We answered the research question stated in Section 1 by 
decomposing it into two sub-problems: the relationship between 
product and projects and the relationship between product 
managers and project managers. In our survey, we identified 
several significant relations. However, we think a complementary 
and more detailed examination on the way product companies 
organize the internal and external activities that link their product 
management and project management processes is necessary. 
4.  REFERENCES 
[1]  Clements, P. C., Jones, L. G., Northrop, L. M., and 
McGregor, J. D. 2005. Project Management in a Software 
Product Line Organization. IEEE Softw. 22, 5 (Sep. 2005), 
54-62. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MS.2005.133 
[2]  Barney, S., Aurum, A., and Wohlin, C. 2008. A product 
management challenge: Creating software product value 
through requirements selection. J. Syst. Archit. 54, 6 (Jun. 
2008), 576-593. DOI= 
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sysarc.2007.12.004 
[3]  Ebert, C. 2009. Software Product Management. Crosstalk, 
22, 1 (Jan. 2009), 15-19. 
[4]  Komssi, M., Kauppinen, M., Heiskari, J., and Ropponen, M. 
2009. Transforming a Software Product Company into a 
Service Business: Case Study at F-Secure. In Proceedings of 
the 2009 33rd Annual IEEE international Computer 
Software and Applications Conference - Volume 01 (July 20 
- 24, 2009). COMPSAC. IEEE Computer Society, 
Washington, DC, 61-66. DOI= 
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC.2009.18 
[5]  Ebert, C. 2007. The impacts of software product 
management. J. Syst. Softw. 80, 6 (Jun. 2007), 850-861. 
DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2006.09.017 
[6]  van de Weerd, I., Brinkkemper, S., Nieuwenhuis, R., 
Versendaal, J., and Bijlsma, L. 2006. Towards a Reference 
Framework for Software Product Management. In 
Proceedings of the 14th IEEE international Requirements Engineering Conference (September 11 - 15, 2006). RE. 
IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 319-322. 
DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/RE.2006.66 
[7]  Weerd, I. van de,  Brinkkemper, S., Versendaal, J. 
(forthcoming). Incremental method evolution in global 
software product management: A retrospective case study. 
/Accepted for publication in the Journal of Information & 
Software Technology 
[8]  Haines, S. 2009. The Product Manager's Desk Reference. 
McGraw Hill, New York. 
[9]  Kerzner, H. 2001. Project Management: A systems approach 
to Planning, Scheduling and Controlling. John Wiley & Sons 
Inc.  
[10] Gorchels, L. 2000. The Product Manager's Handbook: The 
Complete Product Management Resource. McGraw Hill 
(2000) 
[11] Dul. J., Hak, T. 2007. Case Study Methodology in Business 
Research. Elsevier Ltd.  
[12] Yin, R. 2003. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. 
SAGE Publications. 
[13] PMBOK Guide: A guide to the project management body of 
knowledge. 2006. Newtown Square, PA. Project 
Management Institute. 
[14] Manteli, C., Weerd, I. van de, Brinkkemper, S. 2010. An 
empirical research to the relationships between software 
product management and software project management. 
Technical report UU-CS-2010-004. Utrecht University. 




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Solution IDEA Expand it in your own words




Software project refer to development of software product. On the other hand project and product closely related to each other. Product and project management are highly related to each other. Project Managers involved day to day decision making while product managers interact in high levels of decision making.  Software product management can be considered a relative young field, not only the academic environment where there is a considerable gap in researches on the particular topic, but also in the business field where software companies feel uncertain on the way software product management should be organized. Software product includes processes and activities that are concerned mostly with market trends, customer needs and internal company affairs, such as road mapping, business value etc. The project manager may want to keep scope as small as possible so that the projects is deliver on time and under budget. Product managers are business oriented while project managers are more technical.









CS615 Assignment 4 Solution 2011


Software Project Management
Assignment # 04
Spring 2011
                                                               Marks: 20
Due Date
Your assignment must be uploaded before or on 16th June 2011.

Uploading instructions:

Please view the Assignment Submission Process document provided to you by the Virtual University for uploading assignments.

  • Assignment should be in .doc format.
  • Save your assignment with your ID (e.g. bx020200786.doc).
  • Assignment submission through email is highly discouraged.

Rules for Marking:

It should be clear that your assignment will not get any credit if:
·         The assignment is submitted after due date.
·         The submitted assignment file is corrupted.
·         The assignment is copied.
Note:
Your answer must follow the below given specifications. You will be assigned zero marks if you do not follow these instructions.
·          Font style: “Times New Roman”
·          Font color: “Black”
·          Font size: “12”
·          Bold for heading only.
·          Font in Italic is not allowed at all.
·          No formatting or bullets are allowed to use.

Assignment:

                                    
                               
                                  Q.No.1


Your software company got a project from the sale company for the development of the website to manage their visitors. They also want to keep track of their frequent visitors for sales follow up.

A small team which consists of website manager, web developer, content administrator, web administrator and sales manager will develop and manage this project.

Following are the given activities that you perform:

Project planning
Website construction
Content review
Usability testing
Installation of tracking software
Ongoing review of visitors
Sales follow up to frequent users

Following are the given scale that you will use:

R=Responsible, C=Consulted, A=Accountable, I=Informed.

You have to create a responsibility assignment matrix by using the above scale, task and development team. In simple words you have to map the work of the project to the peoples responsible for performing that work using the given scale.






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Not Idea Solution Just Helping Material to Understand this Question.




Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) 

Project roles (who do what) and responsibilities (who decide what) must be assigned to the appropriate project stakeholders. 

Roles and responsibilities may vary over time. Most roles and responsibilities will be assigned to stakeholders who are actively involved in the work of the project, such as the project manager, other members of the project management team, and the individual contributors. 

The roles and responsibilities of the project manager are generally critical on most projects, but vary significantly by application area. Project roles and responsibilities should be closely linked to the project scope definition. 

A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) is often used for this purpose. On larger projects, RAM s may be developed at various levels. 

For example, a high-level RAM may define which group or unit is responsible for each component of the work breakdown structure, while lower-level RAM s are used within the group to assign roles and responsibilities for specific activities to particular individuals.
A structure that relates the project organization structure to the work breakdown structure, to help ensure, that each element of the project’s scope of work is assigned to a responsible individual.
– Shows who does what (x=person, y=phase). The most important feature of the
RAM is the participatory development process involving all stakeholders.
Show who is participant, who is accountable, who handles reviews, who provides input and who must sign off on specific work packages or project phases.  






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SOLUTION





Responsibility Assignment Matrix





Website manager
web developer
content administrator
web administrator
sales manager
WEBSITE





Project planning
R
C
C
A
C
Website construction
A
R
I


Content review
C
A
R
I

Usability testing
A
I

R

Installation of tracking software
R



A
Ongoing review of visitors
A
I
C

R
Sales follow up to frequent users
I



R

R=Responsible, C=Consulted, A=Accountable, I=Informed