A Framework for Linking Projects and Project Management Methods

Abstract

Software development processes such as the Waterfall process and Extreme Programming are Project Management Methods (PMMs) which are well known and widely used. However, conventional Project Management (PM) lacks the process concepts expressed in PMMs, and the connection between PMMs and PM is not much explored in the literature. Our research problem is to make this connection. We present data models for PM and PMM, in a framework that can articulate the PM-to-PMM relationship, illustrating with simple examples. Tools and visualizations created in terms of our framework can make use of the familiarity, history and context of project management tools, and the prescriptiveness and reactivity of PMMs, and we believe these may assist the management of complicated projects, such as IT projects. Project Mentor, a prototype Java/XML implementation of the framework semantics, can create and then revise a PMM-aware project, conforming to a specified PMM. The PM-to-PMM connection is persistent in project data, and we describe a visualization of the footsteps of a PMM in project data that does not rely on the state of a PMM process. The visualization can also be used by Project Mentor, to indicate the state of a PMM. We test for possible applications of our framework with a case study and survey of some existing project data, and conclude with a description of further work.