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Project Management

Our project management approach is based on the guidelines of PRINCE2 and supports the development process in all phases, thus being the linking element between all actors in a project. Its main components include:

Business Case: It is right at the beginning of a project that we ask ourselves and our customer about the underlying business case for running that project. If there is no solid business case, any project is based on weak and uncertain assumptions, which frequently lead to a faltering of the project in later phases without any result but just frustrated partners. The business case has to be monitored and evaluated throughout the complete project.

Project Initialization Document (PID): The most important project parameters are defined at the outset of a new  project: project scope, project teams, responsibilities and duties, escalation paths, project phases and milestones, first high-level project plan, deliverables, quality assurance methods, risk management, communication guidelines, acceptance testing procedures, change management and others. This PID forms the basis for a common understanding of what the project is all about and how all actors should cooperate efficiently with each other.

Quality Assurance: In each project, the quality metrics and quality goals as well as the actions taken to ensure these goals can be met, have to be defined from scratch. Such actions would typically be e.g. peer reviews of all relevant documentation, specifications and test plans as well as the ongoing monitoring of time and budget totals.

Risk Management: At the beginning of each project, the project manager conducts a risk analysis to identify all potential risk factors, evaluate their probability of taking place and  the impact this would bring to the project. Corrective or preemptive actions may be defined to avoid, reduce or counteract these risks.

Communication guideline: This document describes which project actors should get into contact with each other when and how. Typical examples would be regular status reports, weekly telcos or other jours fix, available time slots for longer chats and discussions or using web-based project portals for various types of interaction and documentation.

Project Plan: A solid project plan is the blueprint for each project (unless done following an agile methodology) and  mandatory for reliable time, effort and results management. This is why a project plan is created high-level at the outset of a project and gets maintained and updated by the project manager over time. Elements of a project plan are the overall project's structure (e.g. as Gantt chart or critical path plan), work packages, activities and resource assignments, milestones and deliverables. A good project plan also allows the capturing and tracking of planned vs. actual figures for efforts and progress, thus providing the basis for effective project controlling.

Change Management: Most projects face changes all along the way, be it changes to the project's scope, to individual requirements, to quality goals or other characteristics. All such change requests have to be captured, analyzed and evaluated according to a standardized process as this is the only way project managers and clients can decide whether changes should be implemented, postponed or discarded. All agreed changes have to be incorporated into the project plan.
 

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