Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives with a high quality and the lowest possible cost.

Depending on the project size and the complexity of your environment, we are using

• Either an agile methodology easing the communication and the prototyping
• Or a more formal methodology easing the rigor and the follow-up of the development activities

Agile Software Development

Agile methods emphasize face-to-face communication over written documents when the team is all in the same location. When a team works in different locations, they maintain daily contact through videoconferencing, voice, e-mail, etc.

An agile teams works in a single open office (called bullpen), which facilitates such communication. Team size is typically small (5-9 people) to help make team communication and team collaboration easier. Larger development efforts may be delivered by multiple teams working toward a common goal or different parts of an effort. This may also require a coordination of priorities across teams.

The advantages of the Agile Software Development approach are the following:

• Team spirit
• Improve communication within the team
• Customer satisfaction
• Minimize risk through small iterations

Rational Unified Process (RUP)

The RUP has determined a project lifecycle consisting of four phases:

• Inception: the primary objective is to scope the system adequately as a basis for validating initial costing and budgets
• Elaboration: the primary objective is to mitigate the key risk items identified by analysis up to the end of this phase
• Construction: the primary objective is to build the software system
• Transition: the primary objective is to 'transition' the system from the development into production, making it available to and understood by the end user.

These phases allow the process to be presented at a high level in a similar way to how a 'waterfall'-styled project might be presented, although in essence the key to the process lies in the iterations of development that lie within all of the phases. Also, each phase has one key objective and milestone at the end that denotes the objective being accomplished.

The advantages of the Rational Unified Process approach are the following:

• Well structured approach
• Customer satisfaction
• Minimize risk through iterations

Ask more information about project management services.