A rising number of software projects today boast of precise processes and carefully calibrated time schedules, thanks to the 10 P’s that are helping redefine project management

Sleepless nights and endless cups of coffee…A budget over shot and the sword of an almost missed deadline hanging dangerously low…Freshly discovered bugs in the final version of the software solution and the sales head screaming…Is that what software projects are all about? While some of these occurrences still trigger off the adrenaline levels of project managers across the Indian IT industry, the Indian software industry has come a long way since those chaotic days of the boom.

The buzz of words like knowledge management, formal management training and company-wide project planning practices reverberating across the annals of Indian software companies speaks volumes about the maturing of the industry itself.

Dataquest brings to you ten practices that have transformed the face of software project implementation by Indian companies…

1 Planning
Even as the sales team revels in the euphoria of having bagged a plum deal, it is time for swift action at the delivery end. But unlike the flurry of uncoordinated activity that often set projects rolling in the past, projects today, start with a company-wide meeting involving all the stake-holders of the project. Anand Shankar Lal, PM at Infogain explains how a project kick off meeting includes not just the project team and senior management, but other associated groups like quality assurance and system support in order to understand the project requirement, milestones and risks.

"When you promise 24X7 service to customers, logistical requirements of people working at the backend become extremely important. Arrangements for food, transport and the security of teams working round the clock need to be tackled. For this reason, involving HR and administrative heads (who will be responsible for making these arrangements) in the planning meeting helps. Attending these meetings gives them a feel of the importance of the project to the company and automatically buys greater commitment." says Kanad Chaterjee, senior Project Manager, HCL Tech

To deal with the chronic problem of vague, inaccurate and un-testable specifications, it needs to be ensured that a requirement baseline must be agreed upon before the beginning of project planning activities.

"A mature estimation team should be assigned to agree to the most realistic estimate of project size, effort and cost. At least two independent estimates should be arrived at, preferably using two different methodologies, based on actual data of similar past projects. Initial software estimates and schedules should be looked on as high risk due to the lack of definitive information available at the time they are defined. The estimates and schedules should be refined as more information becomes available," says Vipul Doshi, COO, InterGlobe Technologies.

When it comes to allocating resources/talent or hiring new talent for various modules, SEED Infotech guidelines advise PMs to first identify all possible roles required in a project, identify personnel fitting these roles, allocate responsibilities, authorities and accountabilities. Vishweshwar Hegde, general manager, global quality function, Mindtree Consulting highlights the importance of a comprehensive estimation technique (with tools) to address effort, schedule, cost and project profitability up front at proposal stage of the project.

"In a nutshell, planning a project is 99% common sense and 1% technical sense," says D Ramesh, Project Manager, Accel Software and Technologies.

2 People
At the end of the day, companies have realized that technology and process deliverables do fall into place, it is the allocation of human resources and managing them that required deft handling. "No sharing of resources across projects is the basic principle. Though this means higher pressure on resource optimization, it is well worth the cost," points out Sudhir Goel, vice president, delivery at MphasiS BFL Group. Goel explains that just-in-time recruitment is difficult and is very rarely attempted.

When it comes to figuring out who is doing what, activities, which requires instant client interaction are entrusted onsite. If resource usage is heavy, the function is carried out on homeground. Time zone deviations can be put to advantage by assigning complimentary tasks to teams in diverse zones.

Advises D Ramesh, PM at Accel Software and Technologies, "Put the best people in the most critical places of a project. But do not let the team know about the critical tags. Know the learning curve of each member of your team. Give a little more weightage to in-house talent (The ‘known devil’ dictum)." When dividing the teams into geographical locations, the logistics of the implementation phase need to be kept in mind.

"For example, for a client based in London, UK, I may send my team leads for the design to the UK. The implementation team may be located in Mumbai. The team leads bring back the design details, and ramp up the team. And when it’s time for the implementation phase, it is good to have a team coordinator with excellent business and technical skills liaising with the clients at UK. Unless absolutely necessary, the implementation team should not be further geographically distributed. That simply increases the challenges, "explains MBT Project manager, Shilpa Kapadia.

HCL Tech follows the system of having "shadows" (backups for team members). "These people are closely involved in the project but their cost is borne by the software company, not by the client. In case a team member has to leave at short notice, the shadows are ready to take over," explains Pradeep Sharma, Project Manager, HCL Tech.

3 Processes
The key reason why companies have been able to eliminate the ambiguity in projects is because precise processes have been laid down and are being followed.

"According to the traditional mode of work, a task would be assigned with a request for an update every two hours.

Typically, at the end of two hours, one would discover that the task is well behind schedule, with the result that a task which merits eight hours of work now needs to be accomplished only in six hours," says Anant Koppar, CEO, Kshema Technologies and probably one of the few CEOs certified by the Project Management Insititute. Koppar explains that in the above scenario, established processes would enforce discipline, making monitoring easier.

Yogen Chawla, General Manager, Systems, CSC, India elaborates on the usage of automated workflow systems. "The beginning of a new module is initiated by a Project Manager who assigns the analysis request to a Business Analyst. On completion of the analysis, an alert automatically goes to the technical staff. The automated system controls the flow of the work through design, coding, reviews and testing phases with automated alerts sent from one resource to another on completion of the various stages of the work product. The acceptance testing by functional experts (or Business Analysts as we call them) and their signoff on the workflow system triggers the Delivery team to package the work product for final deliver to the customer. Project teams at multiple locations have access to common databases and use the same workflow systems to ensure consistency and coordination amongst the project teams," says Chawla.

Birlasoft too uses automated tools for detailed schedules of the project, budgeting and activities like projecting tracking, timesheets, defecting prevention and VOC (voice of customer) capturing.

At Sonata Software, tools are used for estimating the project size and effort. Tools provide a set of standard templates for work breakdown structure for various types of projects like new development, application re-engineering, maintenance etc.

These templates are enhanced by adding new activities based on the lessons learnt from past projects. As the project progresses, team members suddenly find that the days appear to be getting shorter. It is here that metrics data provides a strong handle to the Project Manager on any deviations from the planned values.

"The deviations are tracked and discussed with the senior Management at the review meetings for all projects after analysis of data by metrics group. The deviations are analysed for root cause and then corrective actions are defined for final closure of the project.," explains Rajesh Tikku, Vice-President Delivery, Infinite Computer Solutions.

Mphasis BFL has a system of weekly/monthly audit by the QMS team that reports to the CEO/COO. "This audit uses a quantification process to assign numbers to each metric. Based on overall scores, a project’s health can be determined. Any unapproved deviation from the schedule is an automatic over-ride and puts the project in a red status. Another control mechanism is the use of special milestones in the project schedule which provide symptomatic indication of future successes and failures, " explains Sudhir Goel, Vice President - Delivery at MphasiS BFL Group.

4 Prudence
These are difficult times and budgets are tight no doubt. Even as adherence to processes and the inevitable long work hours that come along ensure that deadlines are stuck to, sticking to a budget remains a greater challenge. As Wipro Technologies’GM, software engineering V Subramanyam says, "In the early days, infrastructure, conveyance and people costs were covered under a general head and approved quite easily. Now things have changed. Cost estimation sheets are monitored closely. All travel for instance, cannot be billed, but needs to be justified."

Similarly, there is no procuring of technical tools (even if the project demands it) unless it been specified to client. Subramanyam explains how the setting up of an organization-wide tools lab helps where tools and licenses can be shared across projects.

Anand Shankar Lal, PM, Infogain suggests budgeting small expenses even if the probability of incurring them is very less. "The more detailed budgeting is done, the probability of sticking to it is higher, because during operations, the project team encounters a situation where a lot of cost drivers are not identified and hence they run into trouble. Budgeted versus actual expenses are taken as one of the important indicators of the project performance," he says.

Preparing a budget or estimation involves making top-down estimate and verifying this with a bottom-up estimate. A top-down estimate involves making an inventory of the features required in the system, and estimating the effort to develop each feature. Next is preparing a bottom up estimate. This involves determining precise components that go into building the features of the system, estimating the time for each, and summing up the total time for the development of various components.

"The next step is to perform a gap-analysis between the top-down and bottom-up approaches. However, if there is a major gap, that might mean some thing has been missed in either estimate for which the Project Manager would need to reconcile the gap (if any) between the two estimates," explains Shilpa Kapadia, Project Manager, Delivery Group at MBT.

"At an organization level, Project Management Reviews (PMRs) are conducted at milestones to check for the metrics performance, resource utilization, profit and loss status with a cross-functional team from each of the stakeholders’ areas involved in the the PMR. This ensures that there are no cost overruns, effort variance and schedule variance and the project is performing within the budget. A project is also tracked till closure,"says Sarama Pani - Group Head, Quality Management Group at MBT.

5 Patience
Clients and their changing requirements have been an integral aspect of software implementation. Over time, companies have learnt to anticipate change and be prepared to tackle it without crumbling under pressures of time and budgets.

Mindtree’s Vishweshwar Hegde advises the setting up of a strong Change Management process to address multiple dimensions. "Technical impact: analyzing what parts of the products get impacted. Financial impact on cost, effort and schedule due to the change. Customer impact: early communication of the same to the customer and negotiations.

Strong risk management practices based on the past risk repository and structured risk assessment to prevent some of the impacts of changes" says Hegde.

At Birlasoft, complete change management is done to deal with changing client specs. Any change raised by client is analyzed for impact of cost schedule, work items etc. Change is accepted or rejected by software configuration control board.

Appropriate project re-planning is done according to change.

Amit Kinariwala, head, Enterprise Technologies Group, LG Soft India cites a case in which the client was not very clear about the requirements. "All the departments at the client place had their requirements and own stories to tell. For two months I was at the client site with them adding functionality requirements. There were no cost overruns initially. But by the fourth month, the customer wanted to have some major changes in the processes, which were already delivered to them! Only due to the staged deliveries were we able to satisfy the customer that they need to revert back on changes quickly else it will cost them more.

Thus finally the customer agreed for schedule changes and also paid for it," says Kinariwala.

6 Persistence
Even as the traditional tussle between the Sales team’s attitude to notch up client wins and the technical team’s struggle to deliver the promised goods continues, top level project managers are increasingly being called upon to smoothen interaction with the client.

V Subramanyam, GM, software engineering, Wipro Technologies points out that clients too are becoming more focussed on what they want. "Earlier they used to give end to end project deliverables. The trend now is quick deliverables small time frames."

Sunil Kumar Mittal, general manager, HCL Tech describes how a particular overseas client of the company was being extremely persistent with the sales team to try and bring the cost of the project down. "There were two other companies in the fray, who were willing to do the project at a lower cost. After a two-hour conference call, I could convince the client that we were offering specific advantages in terms of deliverables and quality. The argument was that we would be able to deliver what the other two software companies were offering at a lower cost, but if the client wanted additional deliverables, he would have to pay extra," recalls Mittal.

7 Perfection
There is little doubt that the Indian software brand has arrived where it has today, primarily because of the quality of services offered. Testing, documentation and quality assurance are not activities that teams take lightly after the "hot hob" of coding is done.

For instance, all projects at LGSI need to have Defect prevention leader (DPL). The DPL is required to accumulate and aggregate all the defects (internal reviews raised by client) and perform a causal analysis on them. The outcome of the DP analysis is discussed with the complete team so that most of the recurring defects are avoided in the future.

Rajesh Tikku, vice president, Delivery, Infinite Computer Solutions says the trick is in not only maintaining delivery timelines but also a very high standard of the quality of deliverables. "People may not remember that you delivered a day late, but they will always remember that you delivered bad code," he says.

8 Precaution
Despite stringent quality checks and a product that is certified as perfect by multiple authorities in the organization, cases of software acting up before the client are not uncommon. Kshema executive VP, Y K Maheshwari explains that the testing tool identified at the beginning of the project, may not work in a new operating system. "We discuss this again with the client and look at using a new tool," he says. This is primarily because the hardware and software environment onsite is bound to be different. Once again, the trick is to anticipate such hiccups and allocate enough resources at the client end during the "acceptance phase" until things start functioning smoothly.

"As a precaution, we try to simulate the hardware environment that is prevalent at the client site. At times, we request the client to ship that hardware to our location so that we can test the software in actual client-life conditions," says Ramakrishna of Kshema Technologies.

"And apart from testing the software in the developer’s machine, we also test it in a virgin machine to see id it throws up any unexpected bugs," adds Kshema COO Anand Mutalik. Breaking down work and delivering modules in stages could also solve this problem to a certain extent so that all problems do not pop up at the last stage.

9 Practice
Knowledge management and incorporating the learnings from one project into the next project undertaken by the company has long been part of the holistic vision of companies. But as project managers struggle to first deliver all that the client wants, often imeeting unrealistic deadlines, jotting down learnings often takes a backseat. Over the years, software companies have found ways to pool learnings from past projects and collect them in a central repository to be used by teams across the organization. But how does one ensure that the knowledge and experience gained during one project is actually deposited into this repository?

"Project Managers are not allotted the next project until the completion report, along with learnings is not logged in," smiles Sunil Mittal of HCL Tech.

10 Professionalism
It has been a long journey for Indian software. Companies large and small are continuously striving to put up a face that speaks of commitment, reliability and more than anything else, the confidence that global clients will take them seriously.

May it be processes or people, professional training in project management is the order of the day. Kshema Technologies has made PMI certification mandatory for all project managers in the company. "As CEO it gives me the confidence that things will run professionally in all projects undertaken by the company. I can do my audits without spending more time. India has been poor at cost management and this has reflected in margin pressure. The PMI model accurately calculates how much money has been spent, how much money we have and how much work has been done,"says Kshema CEO Anant Koppar.

We certainly have come a long way from the days of ad hoc customer demands and rushed IT jobs. Companies no longer place the smartest techie on board as the head of the operation and expect things to work out on their own. India’s large software companies have already done it and the smaller ones are doing their best to ensure that those at the helm of projects are professionally trained.

After all, a project is what brings in the bucks for Indian software, sustains burgeoning teams of software professionals and signifies that the bench is a good while away.

Manjiri Kalghatgi

‘It is possible to plan and yet not manage effectively... However, it is not possible to manage effectively without a plan’

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