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Introduction to Project Management
- Introduction
- Purpose
- Relation to Other Disciplines
- Further Reading-the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge
Introduction 
Software Project Management is the art of balancing competing objectives, managing risk, and overcoming constraints to successfully deliver a product which meets the needs of both customers (the payers of bills) and the users. The fact that so few projects are unarguably successful is comment enough on the difficulty of the task.
Purpose
Our goal with this section is to make the task easier by providing some context for Project Management. It is not a recipe for success, but it presents an approach to managing the project that will markedly improve the odds of delivering successful software.
The purpose of Project Management is:
- To provide a framework for managing software-intensive projects.
- To provide practical guidelines for planning, staffing, executing, and monitoring projects.
- To provide a framework for managing risk.
However, this discipline of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) does not attempt to cover all aspects of project management. For example, it does not cover issues such as:
- Managing people: hiring, training, coaching
- Managing budget: defining, allocating, and so forth
- Managing contracts, with suppliers and customers
This discipline focuses mainly on the important aspects of an iterative development process:
- Risk management
- Planning an iterative project, through the lifecycle and for a particular iteration
- Monitoring progress of an iterative project, metrics
Relation
to Other Disciplines
The Project Management Discipline provides the framework whereby a project is created and managed. In doing so, all other disciplines are utilized as part of the project work:
- Business Modeling discipline
- Requirement discipline
- Analysis & Design discipline
- Implementation discipline
- Test discipline
- Deployment discipline
The Project Management Discipline is one of the supporting process disciplines, together with:
- Configuration & Change Management discipline
- Environment discipline
Further
Reading-the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of
Knowledge
It is not our intention in the RUP to present a complete tutorial on project
management. We describe only that subset which is directly related to our
approach to software development, and, of that subset, certain topics (as
noted above) have been ruled out of scope, and are touched on only lightly,
or omitted entirely. The project management approach described here has been
influenced by the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of
Knowledge (PMBOK®), and the reader should consult that work for a complete
coverage of generally accepted best practice in project management. It is
available from 
www.pmi.org.
The Project Management Institute (PMI®) is the leading nonprofit professional
organization covering project management; it establishes project management
standards and provides professional certification.
