Question

Why is it necessary to be good in communication, project management, and financial decision making to grow as competent ECE professional? What are the challenges in managing software development projects? What are typical success and failure statistics in software projects? How do 09 areas of the project management body of knowledge help you to overcome those challenges?

Answer 1

Now, first let us know what is an ECE professional? An ECE or Early Childhood professional is any individual who directly works with young children, from an infant age till eight. These proffesionals generally involve teachers and daycare workers. Any effective project management is incomplete with communication and rather its a nightmare. If you want to take on the task of a project, especially with toddlers, you need to communicate your best. You need to have a clear idea to communicate the goal of the project to all the kids who will take part in the project. You need to make it clear to the children as to who will take part in which task of the project and to what extent. Knowing how to go about your projects, will help you flow through the curriculum and teaching process smoothly. Financial decision making is equally important as it helps an ECE to carve a path and plan a career in education accordingly.

The challenges in the management of software development programs are:

1) Scope estimation: Most of the people tend to make wrong assumptions when it comes to estimating the time, resources and effort need to develop a software. The correct estimation shall decide the use of project management tools.

2) High competition: The next challenge is the highly competitive IT industrywhich is evolving at rapid pace.Globalization is contributing to this competition.

3) User requirements: Meeting this challenge of ever-changing user demand in the IT industry seems quite hard. More changes imply more alterations to the existing code which gives way to more errors and hidden issues.

4) Technology stack: Finding sufficient technology stack and experts with extensive experience and skill set is difficult as the most skiled employees may be involved in other projects at the time.

5) Adapting to innovations: There are technical challenges too such as adapting the latest market requirements to older legacy systems and infrastructure.

Other challenges include interface issues, multiple resolution iterations as well as software bug testing, return on investment etc.

Inspite of the fact that there are new methodologies and project management techniques in use, IT and software projects are still at alarming risks of failure. Some reasons may be inadequate resources, overlooked requirements,poor governance and leadership, highly aggresive timelines, unpredicted complications, underestimated costs, and human faults such as bad code. Studies have shown that on an average, IT projects overrun its budget by 27% and at least every one in six projects have a cost overrun of 200% and a schedule overrun of 70%> The failure of IT projects depends heavily on the project size. A software project with a budget over one million dollars is 50% more likely to fail compared to a project with a budget less than %350,000. Only 2.5% of companies are said to complete their IT projects succesfully.Also, 17% of IT projects are believed to fail so badly that they are capable of threatening the very existence of the company.

In order for people to have a better and easier understanding of project management, the project management body of knowledge have divided their knowledge areas into nine categories. It is a model document for all project managers. This is how they help you to overcome the callenges of project management:

1) Project Integration Management: This implies that project managers need to keep an eye on every detail of the project and confirm that everything is going as planned.For good project integration, the main thng needed is teamwork and for every team member to have a clear idea about their roles and responsibilities.

2) Project scope management: Lack of scope is one of the main reasons behind the failure of a project. The team shoudl clearly know what the deliverables are so it is easier for them to achieve the goals. The sub-processes required are defining the scope, dividing the project into its smaller parts, verifying the scope and controlling it.

3) Project time management: To overcome the challenge of completing the project on time, managers should define, sequence the activities, estimate the required amount of time and resources as well as develop and control a schedule.

4) Project cost management: For effective cost management of a project, you need to estimate the costs correctly, determine the budget and control the costs.

5) Project quality management: In order to achieve a high quality project without any defects and deficiencies each and every time, you need to mainly focus on customer requirements. Get valuable customer feedback from prototypes and make the necessary changes before delivering the final product to the consumer.

6) Project human resource management: It is a very important part of organizing, leading and managing the project teams. First you need to develop a human resource plan, followed by hiring the project team, developing it and finally managing it.

7) Project communication management: Poor project communications destroy your project progress unimaginably. All tea members of the project need to be on the same page and work as a team to attain a common, shared goal. They key activities needed are identifying stakeholders, planning communications, distributing the information, managing the expectations of the stakeholders and reporting the performance.

8) Project risk managemnt: This is one of the most importantfactors in succesful completion and prevetion of the project from failure. The activities the project managers should undertake are planning risk management, identifying the viable risks, performing analysis of both qualitative and quantitative risks, planning risk response and monitoring and controlling the risks.

9) Project procurement management: And the final area is related to all the purchases which are required for effective completion of the project. The procurement should be planned, conducted, administered and closed. It also covers cost benefit analysis, risk and cost utility analysis.