Skip to Content
Effective Software Project Management
book

Effective Software Project Management

by Robert K. Wysocki Ph.D.
March 2006
Beginner to intermediate
618 pages
15h 20m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Effective Software Project Management

Graphical Reporting Tools

Senior managers may have only a few minutes of uninterrupted time to digest your report. Respect that time. They won’t be able to fully read and understand your report if they have to read 15 pages before they get any useful information. Having to read several pages only to find out that the project is on schedule is frustrating and a waste of valuable time.

Gantt Charts

A Gantt chart is one of the most convenient, most used, and easy-to-grasp depictions of project activities that I have encountered in my practice. The chart is formatted as a two-dimensional representation of the project schedule with activities shown in the rows and time shown across the horizontal axis. It can be used during planning, for resource scheduling, and for status reporting. The only down side to using Gantt charts is that they do not contain dependency relationships. Some project management software tools have an option to display these dependencies, but the result is a graphical report that is so cluttered with lines representing the dependencies that the report is next to useless. In some cases, dependencies can be guessed at from the Gantt chart, but in most cases they are lost.

Figure J-1 shows a representation of the Cost Containment Project as a Gantt chart using the format that I prefer. The format shown is from Microsoft Project 2000, but it is typical of the format used in most project management software packages.

Figure J-1. Gantt chart project status report. ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Applied Software Project Management

Applied Software Project Management

Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780764596360Purchase book