The Management Spectrum:
In software engineering, the management spectrum describes the management of a software project. The management of a software project starts from requirement analysis and finishes based on the nature of the product, it may or may not end because almost all software products faces changes and requires support. It is about turning the project from plan to reality.
The management spectrum focuses on the four P’s; people, product, process and project. Here, the manager of the project has to control all these P’s to have a smooth flow in the progress of the project and to reach the goal.
The four P’s of management spectrum are
- People
- Product
- Process
- Project
The four P’s of management spectrum has been described briefly in below.
The People:
People of a project includes from manager to developer, from customer to end user. But mainly people of a project highlight the developers. It is so important to have highly skilled and motivated developers that the Software Engineering Institute has developed a People Management Capability Maturity Model (PM-CMM),
“to enhance the readiness of software organizations to undertake increasingly complex applications by helping to attract, grow, motivate, deploy, and retain the talent needed to improve their software development capability”
Organizations that achieve high levels of maturity in the people management area have a higher likelihood of implementing effective software engineering practices.
The Product:
The product is the ultimate goal of the project. This is any types of software product that has to be developed. To develop a software product successfully, all the product objectives and scopes should be established, alternative solutions should be considered, and technical and management constraints should be identified beforehand. Lack of these information, it is impossible to define reasonable and accurate estimation of the cost, an effective assessment of risks, a realistic breakdown of project tasks or a manageable project schedule that provides a meaningful indication of progress.
The Process:
A software process provides the framework from which a comprehensive plan for software development can be established. A number of different tasks sets— tasks, milestones, work products, and quality assurance points—enable the framework activities to be adapted to the characteristics of the software project and the requirements of the project team. Finally, umbrella activities overlay the software process model. Umbrella activities are independent of any one framework activity and occur throughout the process.
The Project:
The project is the complete software project that includes requirement analysis, development, delivery, maintenance and updates. The project manager of a project or sub-project is responsible for managing the people, product and process. The responsibilities or activities of software project manager would be a long list but that has to be followed to avoid project failure.
A software project could be extremely complex and as per the industry data the failure rate is high. Its merely due to the development but mostly due to the steps before development and sometimes due to the lack of maintenance.