An evolutionary approach to project management process improvement for software-intensive projects

Abstract

Project management plays an important role in software engineering discipline. Project management is about delivering projects "on time", "in budget" and "in quality". Introducing, applying and improving project management process requires systematical and coordinated approach, which helps to overcome organizational barriers, reduce implementation cost, provide knowledge sharing and secure achieved results. Many companies within the software-intensive automotive industry have decided to start the organization-wide process improvement programs. In this context, project management is one of the first key issues on the way to the better processes. This article presents an evolutionary approach to introducing and improving project management organizational methodology. It defines steps needed for incremental implementation of project management in software-intensive organization and its component-projects. It discusses the key success factors, prerequisites, methods and tools used on the way to the better, systematical, universal and practicable project management process. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.