Effective Software Project Management

The Launching Phase of an Incremental SDPM Strategy

Four tasks must be done in the Launch Phase of an Incremental project that are not done in the Launch Phase of a Linear project. They are as follows:

• Handling scope change

• Handling increment handoffs

• Scheduling resources

• Scheduling increments

These are discussed in the subsections that follow.

Handling Scope Change

This is not a discussion of the scope change management process. That has already been defined. Rather, this is a discussion of how to handle a scope change request. You no doubt recall that an Incremental SDPM strategy project is one in which all of the requirements have been defined and minimal changes are expected. In fact, the Incremental SDPM strategy is rather change-intolerant, as you know from earlier discussion in this book. Yet, at the same time, choosing an Incremental approach brings with it the encouragement of scope change. The customer works with and experiences the functionality in each increment, and they will undoubtedly find other things they would have liked in the release if they had only realized it. The current increment gives them the boost they needed to realize the improvement and to make the scope change request to have it implemented in a future increment. This behavior is not unexpected. The fragile nature of requirements gathering will undoubtedly leave some gaps. The customer simply cannot envision everything they need in the solution. It is probably a reasonable request, so what do you ...