Z26/GI03: Project ManagementTutorial:

What to include in your presentation

Graham Collins

Presentations 2004

• GI03 Individual presentations Tues May 11 to Fri May 14 20mins (maximum) followed by 10 minutes questions

• Z26 Group presentations Thurs 27 and Fri 28 May, 30 mins (maximum) followed by 10mins questions

Key points• For projects not yet started, it is important to concentrate

on the goals, intended approach and what other research has been done in this area.

• Where projects have been started you need to identify aspects of your approach (including project management) that could be improved.

• For all presentations if is essential that the reasons for the project and goals are clear. Where appropriate goals are broken down into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) so that you and other stakeholders (including the audience) can see if it possible to assess (or measure) whether the project has been a success.

Presentation Marking

• 60% including project management aspects and technical approach. Many aspects impinge on both categories e.g. architecture issues as some processes advocate an ‘architecture driven approach’

• 20% supporting references• 20% abstract

Material to be submitted on the day of the presentation

• 2 printed copies of slides, abstract and references, stapled together

• Ideally these are separate sections to aid clarity• Some students may wish to add additional notes

where necessary to support the slides. These should be attached to both copies.

Project management issues to be addressed

• Overview (high level perspective of the project)• Objectives (or goals)• Context (background and technical approach)• Project Strategy(scope, who are the stakeholders

and what are their needs, the project life-cycle, what will constitute the project team)

Strategic issues

• Why are you attempting this project? The business case normally covers the what and why of your project including summary aspects of the method and risks. The most important aspect of this is why the project is being attempted and what are the benefits. The balanced scorecard covered in the course took a wider view of benefits than many project management approaches, covering learning, financial aspects, customer value etc.

• How does the project fit into the strategy of the organisation?

• How are you going to achieve a successful result?

Risk Management

• What risks can be identified and how will they be managed? How will new risks be incorporated?

• What is your risk management plan? Show the process that you go through, identification, assessment, prioritisation and strategy identification (mitigation, insurance etc)

• The risks must be given an action, assigned an owner, and the status (of this resolution) must be clear.

Planning issues

• Project Organisation, Product Breakdown Structure (PBS), Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and Linear Responsibility Chart where appropriate

• Schedules (i.e. Gantt charts including milestones) including main phases. Is there a clear dichotomy between design and build or have you adopted an iterative and incremental approach?

• Resources required

Why have you selected your iterative process?

• This may be a highly defined process such as RUP or OPEN, or an agile process such XP.You need to justify why you have selected it. For all research projects an iterative and incremental approach is recommended, to deal with high risk, high priority issues early and gain feedback.

• How will you assess strengths and weaknesses of this process?

Monitoring, Control and Evaluation

• Monitoring and Control. What will be the approach chosen to monitor and control the project? What procedures will be used to monitor the schedule? What internal reports will be generated, by whom and to whom? Are you going to have an issue log? Separate into progress reports and specialist reports.

• What metrics will be selected (e.g. number of lines of code, components, iterations)? How are you going to keep track of this project and progress made (e.g. earned value based on iterations)?

• How will the success of the project be evaluated? What criteria will be used?

Closing the project

• How will you have measured success? What model will you use to access the quality of the project?

• How will close-out the project? Will there be a report?

• Are you going to review the project/process selected? Will this be continuous?