Effective Software Project Management

Balancing Staff, Process, Technology

In this book, I adopt the model shown in Figure 1-10. Staff, or rather the skill and competency profile of the project team, drives the choice software development process and project management process to be employed, and together staff and process drive the choice of technology infrastructure to be employed. This is critical to forming the environment in which the project work will be undertaken. These three factors together form the SDPM strategy.

Figure 1-10. Achieving balance in the SDPM environment

This balance is achieved by first assessing the available staff resources as compared to the skill and competencies needed for the project. The chosen project team then determines the SDPM strategy that best meets the needs of the project and aligns with the team’s capacity to deliver. Knowing that, the team can now select the technology infrastructure that best supports the team’s capacity to deliver using the chosen SDPM strategy. That technology infrastructure includes software choices (programming languages and other support software, hardware, data communications hardware, and so on).

The balance achieved by these choices is represented by the triangle shown in Figure 1-11. It shows the three coordinates (staff, process, and technology). Those coordinates are constrained to the inside of the triangle because there is a linear constraint ...