Introduction

The purpose of the Project Management workflow is to ensure the successful management of your project team's efforts. This includes both the technical aspects of project management planning, scheduling, estimating, project viability assessment, metrics management, subcontractor management, and risk management as well as the softer aspects such as people management and navigating your organization's political waters.

There is far more to project management than planning, estimating, and scheduling.

What are some of the best practices that your team can adopt with respect to project management? First, you may find that you need to break everyone out of the serial mindset, including yourself, and put yourself into the iterative and incremental mindset of the Unified Process. This is a fundamental principle of the Unified Process and of modern software development in general many managers, particularly oder ones, are still in a serial mindset. Second, focus your team on building software, not on creating documents. If an artifact doesn'tdirectly contribute to the development or validation of software, then you must seriously question why it is being developed. A UML class model that your programmers can use as the basis to write code is of great value; a logical data model that you create simply so it can be checked off of some senior manager's task list isn't. Third, build your team and foster a team culture that promotes teamwork and the development of software that reflects your project goals. As you bring people onto your team, you should...