Project Management

At a high level, our project managers are tasked with bringing their expertise and experience coupled with the innovative use of our project management tools and best practices to simplify the monitoring and management of each project goal within agreed upon scope, time and cost constraints.

We have adopted some of the leading project management and project portfolio management tools in the industry within our project management practice. Some of these tools include:

• JIRA with SCRUM plugin
• Team Foundation Server
• Projector PSA

We have a software engineering process group (SEPG) that is tasked with analyzing best practices and innovative wasy to leverage the above mentioned software tools.

We follow the following Project Management Processes for projects execution:

Project Planning

Project planning is the crucial first step where we take stock of the project - the scope, risks, constraints, and resources available. We use these as inputs to create a project baseline plan. The baseline is prepared by the project manager in consultation with the client, software architects and lead developers.

The project plan consists of:

• List of activities and sub-activities to be completed along with expected end results
• Chart of activities against time schedule, with milestones for monitoring and control
• Hardware, software and other resource requirements
• List of software tools to be used
• Project reporting formats and content
• Known risks and constraints, and mitigation strategies for each

Project Monitoring, Control (PMC) & Reporting

Once project execution commences, the Project manager monitors progress of activities against the plan and prepares weekly/monthly status reports. The PM takes preventive/corrective action in consultation with stakeholders, based on developments that may adversely impact the success of the project.

The monthly and weekly status reports are intended for discussion in the monthly PMC meetings. The status report contains:

• Progress versus Plan
• Variance from Plan and the reason for the same
• Issues that require attention from the client
• Corrective action required to eliminate variance against plan

In addition to the PMC meetings, client / project manager conduct weekly project review meetings to monitor and control project activities. If any critical issue is not resolved in time, the issue is escalated to the management on both sides to ensure quick resolution of the problem.

Project Communication and Collaboration

We advocate establishing formal and informal channels of communication at different organizational levels. Informal communication is essential in a distributed development environment where delays can be more pronounced if all communication is routed through formal channels. We provide our development team with the appropriate tools to support this communication mechanism. For the PM, communication is both at a strategic and tactical level, and he is the only one who communicates with all stakeholders – the delivery team, QA team and management on both sides.

With the widespread use of wikis and similar collaboration mechanisms, we have a well defined practice mechanism in place to facilitate offline communication between personnel in an uncomplicated and hassle free manner.

Communication for project management activities includes:

• Exchange of documents and reports – through Internet e-mail
• Problem reporting and tracking system – through mutually agreed problem management report procedure
• Service request/change request – through mutually agreed change management procedures
• Code / data – through mail or VPN connectivity between the customer and our infrastructure

Communication will be through the following means:

• Telephone
• IM / Chat
• Electronic Mail
• Video-conferencing

Project Risk management

Risk management is the most important aspect that a PM needs to take care of. Risks, known and unknown can derail a project and bring about irreparable damage to project fortunes. We have factored in a set of risks likely to hit the project at any level, and ensure that the PM assigned to the project has identified and covered these risks even before the project execution starts.

Our Project risk management broadly encompasses the following activities:

• Identification of risk factors
• Identifying risk mitigation strategies
• Implementing contingency plans

At any point in time, we will monitor and take corrective action if required on the following set of variables:

• Risk management
• Software requirements management
• Change management
• Software configuration management
• Software release management

We maintain an organization risk repository that contains successful risk mitigation strategies adopted in previous projects. The repository is continuously updated based on the lessons learnt from different engagements.

Resource Management

We ensure that projects are adequately staffed with resources having right skills, based on the proposed roles and responsibilities of the team. Over and above the technical skills required, following attributes of the individual are also taken into consideration while assigning them to a specific engagement:

• Passion for technology
• Passion for customer satisfaction
• An in-depth understanding of quality procedures
• Analytical skills
• Leadership qualities
• Attitude towards learning new things
• Aptitude towards working on challenging assignments