The currency of choice in software project management is often effort, rather than dollars or euros or pounds or any other national currency. This ensures that each phase is measured and controlled independently, and that the relationship with the provider can be terminated after completion of any phase, should the relationship deteriorate beyond saving.Ĭarolyn Seaman, Yuepu Guo, in Advances in Computers, 2011 3.3 Software Development Effort Estimation It is preferable to obtain a fixed price for each phase of the project from the solution provider, and to handle each phase as a separate project. These RFIs will be filed in the established project note book (PNB), as they will then form part of the contractual baseline. All ambiguous/unclear requirements will be clarified and abbreviated requirements will be expanded on by means of request for information (RFI) forms. The detail project plan is finalized in the project-planning phase and any uncertainties regarding the project scope are clarified and the quality assurance plan is finalized. The plan, execute and control components are directly applicable to the deliverables and client involvement. Some software solution providers use IPEC (Initiate, Plan, Execute, Control) as the high level approach to all projects, where the initiate component is an internal process of the provider leading to a proposal being prepared.
This approach lessens the risk for both the customer and software provider and produces better systems at lower costs. This does not even take into account the effect of non-functional software on product quality, throughput and yield. The later in the process, the more it costs to effect a change. The design phase impacts dramatically on the development costs and the total development costs. Seventy percent of software costs go on maintenance of existing software, so it is very important to ensure that the design is easily maintainable. I know this isn't a new term/concept but it has seen a recent surge in discussion especiall.Additional cost spent on extra checking at the beginning stage(s) of a project is cheaper than the errors at the developed stages because testing is more complex and costly, and documentation changes are more widespread when more people are involved in correcting the error. Whether you were surfing social media, listening to a podcast/news, or just chatting with friends, you have probably heard of the term/concept of "quiet quitting".
So I was wondering, what is out there (aside from M$ Project) that will allow us to outline and update projects instead of cluttering up my queue? The less expensive (or free), the better. These tickets, sometimes being in excess of 3 months, has an obvious impact on our ticket closure metric. While looking for ways to do this, I noticed that our software team usually has tickets in for projects, feature requests for our internal and external websites, and long term, repeating tasks, etc. So I need to find a way to shorten the "time to ticket close" (our ticket first response is under an hour, so I think that's ok for now). In English, my boss wants shorter ticket times, while making sure we get the job done right the first time. As the person in charge of helpdesk, a priority of mine is making sure that our ticket times reflect that we are efficient. We have one main office where all of the IT people are, and then 2 branch plants, including one out of state. Our IT department is 8 people, roughly half being hardware support / helpdesk and the other half being software support / developers.