I am not a big fan of concepts which moves industry standards to IT. I am rather a Agile and Scrum guy. Managing multiple projects at once and trying to set a highest quality standard is a challenge and this book shows how industrial language can be translated into software development. I do not think that it is a IT project Bible but it is a some kind of handbook for multiple project management purposes. Not easy and not obvious but worth reading to imagine some structural and complicated issues. Second part of the title is “Ensuring Product Integrity and Program Quality” – great catchword, let’s see if there is an answer.
Authors Jon M. Quigley and Kim H. Pries are well known project management authorities. Kim is an author of a book regarding Six Sigma for New Millennium, Jon is a project management consultant with many years experience in software and hardware development. The book written by practitioners is compact, concise and based on the problems and solves them. Quickly get answers for your questions. There are many charts, diagrams and schemas. “War stories” that end every chapter give us a concrete solutions for real life issues.
I will explain a few chapters, which were taken especially in my memory. Every project manager will find something valuable.
1.1.7 Project Manager’s Role
This is a great, ten page long chapter dealing with described role components like customer focus, brainstorming, team creation and conflicts resolving. It shows different organization structures: functional and matrix. It also shows the multiplicity of channels of communication and exchange valuable ideas in the form of checklist.
3 Concept
What is more important, if not the idea? What is more important than the well-described and validated idea? This section thoroughly describes each component of the complex process of creating the concept and refining the requirements. I cannot not talk about how easy it is to analyze and respond to change – these issues are determined with a type of Agile methodology, but describes things at a higher level, help to better understand this most important stage of production.
7 Release to Production
This is my favorite part, release management is an issue that recently had to do in life. I know how difficult it is to truly organize this stage of the project, which has a crucial impact on the quality of the final product.
Described points are taken from the industry, but very well suited for the production of software, you will find here: Trial Productions Runs, Pilot Runs, Method Builds, Production Release Risk and Costs.
Project Management of Complex and Embedded Systems is available at Amazon.com.
