Project Manager

The Project Manager:

• allocates resources
• shapes priorities
• coordinates interactions with the customers and users
• generally tries to keep the project team focused on the right goal, and
• establishes a set of practices that ensure the integrity and quality of project artifacts

Project Manager responsibilities:

iteration assessment

The iteration assessment captures the result of an iteration, the degree to which the evaluation criteria were met, and lessons learned and changes to be done.

iteration plan

A time-sequenced set of activities and tasks, with assigned resources, containing task dependencies, for the iteration; a fine-grained plan.

business case

The Business Case provides the necessary information from a business standpoint, to determine whether or not this project is worth investing in.

For a commercial software product, the business case should include a set of assumptions about the project and the order of magnitude return on investment (ROI) if those assumptions are true. For example, the ROI will be a magnitude of five if completed in one year, two if completed in two years, and a negative number after that. These assumptions are checked again at the end of the elaboration phase when the scope and plan are defined with more accuracy.

quality assurance plan

The Quality Assurance Plan is an artifact that provides a clear view of how product, artifact and process quality are to be assured. It contains the Review and Audit Plan and references a number of other artifacts developed during the Inception phase. It is maintained throughout the project.

software development plan

The Software Development Plan is a comprehensive, composite artifact which gathers all information required to manage the project. It encloses a number of artifacts developed during the Inception phase and is maintained throughout the project.

• measurement plan

  Define the measurement goals, the associated metrics, and the primitive metrics to be collected in the project to monitor its progress.

  risk management plan

  The Risk Management Plan details how to manage the risks associated with a project. It details the risk management tasks that will be carried out, assigned responsibilities and any additional resources required for the risk management activity. In a smaller scale project, this plan may be embedded within the Software Development Plan

  risk list

  A sorted list of known, open risks to the project, sorted in decreasing order of importance, associated with specific mitigation or contingency actions.

  problem resulution plan

  The Problem Resolution Plan describes the process used to report, analyze and resolve problems that occur during the project.

  product acceptance plan

  The Product Acceptance Plan describes how the customer will evaluate the deliverable artifacts from a project to determine if they meet a predefined set of acceptance criteria. It details these acceptance criteria, and identifies the product acceptance tasks (including identification of the test cases that need to be developed) that will be carried out, assigned responsibilities and resources required. In a smaller scale project, this plan may be embedded within the Software Development Plan

project measurements

The project measurements artifact is the project's active repository of metrics data. It contains the most current project, resources, process and product measurements at the primitive and derived level.

status asssesment

One of the objectives of the process is to ensure that the expectations of all parties are synchronized and consistent. The periodic status assessment provides a mechanism for managing everyone's expectations throughout the lifecycle.

work order

The work order is the Project Manager's means of communicating what is to be done and when, to the responsible staff. It becomes an internal contract between the Project Manager and those assigned responsibility for completion.