Setting Objectives of project

 

Setting Objectives:

To have a successful software project, the manager and the project team members must know what will constitute success. This will make them concentrate on what is essential to project success.

There may be several sets of users of a system and there may be several different groups of specialties involved its development. There is a need for well-defined objectives that are accepted by all these people. Where there is more then one user group, a project authority needs to be identified which has over all authority over what the project is to achieve.

This authority is often held by project movement of committee (project board or project management board) which has overall responsibility for setting, monitoring and modifying objectives. The project manger still has responsibility for running the project on a day to day basis, but has to report to the movement of  committee at regular intervals. Only the movement of committee can authorize changes to the project objectives and resources.

Sub Objectives and Goals

Setting objectives can guide and motivate individual and groups of staff. An effective objective for individual must be something that is within the control of that individual.

An objective might be that the software application to be produced must pay for itself by reducing staff costs over two years. As an overall business objective this might be reasonable. For software developers it would be unreasonable as, through they can control development costs, any reduction in operational staff costs depends not just on them but on the operational management after the application had ‘gone live’. What would be appropriate would be to set a goal or sub objective for the software developer developers to keep development costs within a certain budget.

            Thus, objectives will bee be broken down into goal or sub-objectives, Here we say that in order to achieve that objective we must achieve certain goals first. These goals are steps on the way to achieving an objective, just as goals scored in a football match are steps towards the objective of winning the match.

The mnemonic SMART is something used to describe will defined objectives-

·         Specific: Effective objectives are real and well defined. Vague aspirations such as to improve customer relations are unsatisfactory. Objectives should be defined in such a way that it is obvious to all whether the project has been successful or not.

·         Measurable: Ideally there should be measures of effectives which tell us how successful the project has been. For example-  to reduce customer complaints would be more satisfactory as an objective than to improve customer relations. The measure can, in some cases, be answer to simple yes/no question. Eg. Did we install the new software by 1 June.

·         Achievable: It must be within the power of the individual or group to achieve the objective.

·         Relevant: The objectives must be relevant to the true purpose of the project.

·         Time constrained:  There are should be defined point in time by which the objective should have been achieved.

Bearing in mind the above discussion of objectives, comment on the appropriateness of the wording of  each of the following ‘objectives’ for software developers-

1.      To implement the new application on time and within budget.

2.      To implement the new software application with the fewest possible software errors that might lead to operational failures.

3.      To design a system that is user-friendly.

4.      To produce full documentation for the new system. 

Measures of effectiveness

Measures of effectiveness provide practical methods of ascertaining whether an objective has been met. A measure of effectiveness will usually be related to the installed operational system. Mean time between failures might, for example, be used to measure reliability. Such measures are performance measures will want to get some idea of the likely performance of the completed system as it is being constructed. They will therefore be seeking predictive measures. For example- a large number of errors found during code inspection might indicate potential problems later with reliability.   

           

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