Program Management
Program Management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives.
The primary challenge of Program Management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while adhering to classic project constraints - scope, quality, time, and budget. The secondary and more ambitious challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives.
JBA projects are a carefully defined set of activities that use resources (people, technology, and processes) to achieve the project goals and objectives.
Background
Program Management comprises two or more projects. A project is a finite endeavor - having specific start and completion dates - undertaken to create a unique product or service which brings about beneficial change or added value.
This finite characteristic of projects stands in sharp contrast to processes, or operations, which are permanent or semi-permanent functional work to repetitively produce the same product or service. In practice, the management of these two systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of a separate management philosophy.
Why JBA
JBA's Program Management approach determines and implements the exact needs of the client, based on knowledge of the industry and technologies employed. The ability to adapt to the various internal procedures and constraints of the projects is essential in ensuring that the key issues of cost, time, quality, and above all, client satisfaction, are realized.
JBA executes multiple projects each year. Full responsibility for executing a project rests with the Program Manager and Project Manager, who must make sure that the project team delivers high-quality software to our clients on schedule and within budget. To help the project manager fulfill this responsibility, support from the organization is necessary. This section provides a brief background on JBA and its support for managing projects.
Project management is at the center of the delivery of all JBA services. JBA takes a rigorous, systematic approach to project management ensuring reliability in commitments, transparency of progress, and decreased risk. All JBA Project Managers are Project Management Professionals (PMP) as certified by the International Project Management Institute (PMI). The principles and metrics of PMI are tightly interwoven into JBA's project management process so that projects can best synchronize with the development teams of our international clients.
The JBA Project Management process includes:
- Project Kick-off
- Project Estimation
- Project Planning and Control
- Requirements Analysis and Management
- Change Management
- Testing Management
- Project Tracking
- Project Closeout
Estimation
Critical to project planning and management is estimation. JBA provides different levels of estimates based on the project phase. Levels of accuracy improve as we approach the design phase of the project.
For all projects we complete two separate estimations using two methodologies. Depending on the project, JBA's estimation team will select two of the following methods to document scope and estimate effort, schedule and cost: Work Breakdown Structure, Function Point, Component Sizing, Historical Analysis, and Wide Band Delphi.
The results are compared and a conclusion drawn. Over the last year JBA has utilized this process to achieve an average schedule variance across all projects of less than 5%. We are continuously refining this to ensure greater accuracy.
Project Planning and Tracking
To create the project plan, the JBA Project Manager will refine the WBS (work breakdown structure) estimation.
Once the appropriate level of detail has been achieved, the project plan is baselined. JBA makes significant use of the Earned Value metric for tracking project status and performance. Other tools include weekly status reports, early warning reports, monthly reports, conference calls and issue resolution sessions. These enable the JBA team and the client project manager to review progress, risk, dependency, issues and take corrective actions to keep the project on track to meet its quality, cost and time objectives.
Requirements Analysis and Management
The JBA process is largely based on RUP (Rational Unified Process), and as such, relies on use cases to drive user requirements. Our systematic approach ensures that all requirements are addressed properly throughout the lifecycle and enables accurate reporting of progress implementing them.
Change Management
Change is part of all projects, and should be managed effectively and efficiently to keep the project on track. Thus JBA establishes a Change Control Board (CCB) for each project.
All change requests are processed through the CCB. For each request raised, JBA will perform the feasibility analysis. Based on the feasibility analysis we will do the impact analysis (Schedule and Budget) for the particular change. Only changes approved by the client will be implemented, with the project plan updated accordingly.
