Page 281 - DCAP304_DCAP515_SOFTWARE_PROJECT_MANAGEMENT

Unit 14: Small Projects

Notes

Notes Before you know it, your small project has become a much larger one and you will
inevitably fail to deliver your project to your original budget and schedule.

Risk Management

There will be risks even on a small project. Make sure you have thought through all the potential
risks at the beginning of the project, monitor the top ten risks each week (or top five if the
number of risks is small) and keep looking out for new risks. Failing to manage risk properly is
one the main causes for projects to fail.

The overhead in managing risks is very low. On a recent project, I drew up a list of what I
considered to be all the risks on the project. It came to about 10 risks in all. Of these, five were
serious risks. We worked out a plan to avoid or minimize each risk. In all, it took me little over
a couple of hours to do this. Then, each week on the project, we would spend say half an hour
reviewing all the risks and thinking of any new ones. At the end of the project, whilst some risks
actually had materialized, because we’d identified a plan at the start of the project to minimize
the impact of these risks, the impact of these risks on the project ended up being minimal.
So, with little up front and ongoing effort, you get a big pay back if you manage the risks
throughout the project.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. ……………………. methods focus on delivery of software rather than documentation.
2. Instead, for small projects we find that creating a …………………… in Microsoft Excel is
the best.
3. On a small project there shouldn’t be any need for any fancy change ………………….. to
decide if the change is accepted.

4. Failing to manage …………………… properly is one the main causes for projects to fail.
5. It is in your interest to define what these ………………….. are since you are likely to be
assessed on whether the project meets those objectives.

6. Even on the …………………….. project there will be objectives which must be achieved.

14.2 Problem with Student Projects

Why Student Projects are Good

Before we take a look at some of the key issues with student projects, I’d like to take a moment
to explain why student projects are beneficial. First off, it promotes teamwork, something that
is crucial in the game industry, since games are built, in most cases, by diverse teams of talented
people. Learning to work alongside others towards the same goal is a valuable skill you must
learn if you want to make it in this industry. Along with teamwork, it also promotes good
communication skills. Because you will be working with people who may speak a different
language than you in terms of development and discipline (not actual languages), you will need
to learn how to effectively communicate with them. Oftentimes, designers will have trouble
communicating to programmers, while programmers may have trouble communicating with

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