The Importance of Project Control
Many software developers all over the world write articles on the importance of project management. Unfortunately, most of them give only the general definition of this notion without describing its main tasks and stages in greater detail. In this article we will tell you about project management in software development and about one of its important activities that is called project control. Their significance for software development process is really great.
Let’s begin our talk with the definition of project management because it is hard to understand the value of this process without learning it.
Project management in software development is a complex process aimed at creating high quality software and delivering it to the customer just in time. It has lots of aspects. The methods of project management depend on the software development methodology you use. However, the structure of this process is always the same. It has only three sequential stages. The first of them is the planning stage. A good and realistic plan is extremely important for every software development project. It helps the developers forecast the terms of product delivery and define all activities necessary during a certain project. After the plan is created, it should be implemented. The next stage of project management is aimed at that. It is called project monitoring. The main idea of this stage is to track the process of project realization and detect problems in it. These problems may be caused by certain features of the initial plan or by external factors. They should be eliminated.
Project control is the next stage of project management process. After the problems are detected, their source must be identified. As soon as it is done, the developers eliminate problems with implementation of project’s plan. However, this is not the end of project management process. After the problems are removed, the developers should make sure that they didn’t impact the functionality of software product critically. Hence, project control stage is the stage of product testing. In modern software development teams this process is usually conducted automatically.
The importance of project monitoring and control
As you can see, all stages of project management process are crucial for the success of software development projects. However, monitoring and control are the most important project management activities. A good and realistic project plan is useless if the team does not conduct activities on its implementation. Project control is extremely important to deliver high quality software products to the customers.
The importance of project management tools
To understand the importance of project management tools it is necessary to give the definition for them.
Project management tools are applications created to make the work of software developers simpler. We have already mentioned that project management is a complex process and described its main stages. Before the invention of project management applications the developers had to waste a lot of time on these activities. Now they are automated.
Modern software development industry has special project management tools for all methodologies. They are capable of visualizing the workflow of every software development team in various forms like charts, tables, and diagrams.
The importance of project management tools is justified by the need to save time for other software development activities like writing code, testing, and analyzing. If some task can be automated, it is better to do that in order to optimize the terms of product delivery.
