Transcript Starting a Business

Project management
Project manager must;
 Plan the Project: Very simply stated, a good plan saves time and
reduces the cost of the project. Or, alternatively defined, a bad plan
costs time and money, reduces profit and can easily result in a loss
and/or bankruptcy.
  Estimate the Cost and Establish the Budget: Budget is a very
important factor since it establishes the limits to which costs can be
taken. Ultimately cost is the driving factor behind the majority of
resources that are needed in a project.
  Identify and Acquire Necessary Resources (People, Equipment,
etc.) productive teams can significantly improve project efficiency. Skills
that are needed in a project need to be resourced during the planning
stages so that costs can be determined.
  Manage the project (to the schedule and within budget): Not
everything can be planned. There are always potential problems that
cannot be foreseen. Contingency plans need to be in place in order to
mitigate the effects of unforeseen problems.
Managing a project involves a number of stages
Project definition
(requirements engineering)
Planning
Proposing a solution Modelling
Analysis, Validation and
Verification
Establish requirements, which will serve to
guide all the other stages of the project.
establish a timed relationship between the
available resources and the project deliverables
identify problems that are not easy to spot
during the planning phase.
Validation: “are we building the correct
system”?
Verification: are we building the system
in the correct way.
Implementation
Build it: If a design error is built into the
implemented system, it could be very difficult
Commissioning
project is delivered to the client, and measured
against the original set of agreed requirements
Requirements Engineering
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Legal basis: It can serve to establish the basis for agreement between
the clients and the suppliers on what the project will provide.
Reduced development effort. A formal requirements document
encourages the various concerned parties to consider rigorously all of
the requirements before design begins. This helps to reduce effort in
subsequent redesign, modifications and retesting. Careful review of the
requirements can reveal omissions, misunderstandings, and
inconsistencies early in the development cycle when these problems
are easier to correct.
Provide a basis for estimating costs and schedules. The
description of the product to be developed can be used as a realistic
basis for estimating project costs. This in turn helps both the clients and
the suppliers because they can both make business decision based on
this.
Provide a baseline for validation and verification. Project can be
validated much more easily if a good requirement document is in place.
Requirements Documentation
User requirements
System requirements
Requirements definition: This is
the definition of the aims form the
user perspective.
What is the system or project
aiming to achieve?
These should be defined to a point
where the project can proceed with
an acceptable level of risk.
Requirements definition: This is
the definition of the aims form the
system perspective.
What is the system or project
aiming to achieve?
These should also consider
resource implications on system
development. (i.e. have we done
something like this before?)
Requirements specification:
Effectively these are the objectives
that need to be met in order that the
aims can be satisfied. This will
normally consist of functional and
Non-Functional requirements
Requirements specification:
Objectives as outlined in the user
requirements, but from the
systems perspective.
It should be clear that some
objectives would be different when
looking at the system as opposed to
the user requirements.
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Functional requirements: As the name implies, these refer to functions
provided by the system for the user.
Therefore these requirements are statements that describe how the user and
the system are expected to react to particular inputs. In other words functional
requirements specify particular behaviours of a user and or a system, or the
interaction between these.
Non-functional requirements: These relate to the quality and attempt to
quantify the value added components of a system and a user.
Generally these will relate to the functional requirements since they operate in
the same environment.
For, example, if the system is a manufacturing process, and the user is a
process operator, then non-functional issues could be the timing performance
on the services or functions offered by the system.
On the other hand, if a project were to design a new architecture for a game
console, which is based on RISC technology, then the non-functional
requirements would include constraints on the development process,
standards, etc.
Typical non-functional requirements include, reliability, scalability, and cost
Planning issues
• Cost: A cost estimate establishes the base line of the project
cost at different stages of the project.
• In science and engineering projects we can use formulas
Three Types of Models are identified
Model
Description
CE
Organic
Small team and much experience
Semi-
Medium size team, no experience in
detached
some aspects of application
Embedded
Strongly coupled involving SW and
KE
CT
KT
2.4
1.05 2.5
0.38
3.0
1.12 2.5
0.35
1.2
0.32
HW and operational constraints. 3.6
2.5
Little experience of application.
250000
Effort Value
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9000
Effort Metric
Organic
Semi-Detached
Embedded
Modelling
• Iconic models: These use a physical representation of a real
object, such as for example, a scale model of a formula 1 car.
• Analogue models: These are also physical in form, but rather
than represent the physical dimensions, these models describe
the meaning and they can be used too represent dynamic
situations statically. For example, state transition models are
used to depict how a system traverses between states after an
event occurs. A system flowchart is another example of this type
of model as is a data flow diagram or an entity relationship (ER)
diagram in database work.
• Mathematical models: These models use symbols and
mathematical relationships to represent reality. Being
mathematical, these can be manipulated in ways that the actual
problem components cannot. For example, if a mathematical
model of a flying machine demonstrates that it will crash, no one
gets hurt because it will not be built in that way. Studying and
analysing the mathematical model can draw conclusions
regarding the real problem.
Mathematical model structure
Decision Variables:
These are unknowns
that have to be
determined.
Uncontrollable Variables:
Represent the factors that affect
the result but are not under the
control of the decision maker.
Mathematical Relationships:
These include the Objective
function and the Constraints
Dependent Variables
Outputs
Optimisation Tools:Linear programming (LP) involves the use of mathematical
techniques to obtain an optimum solution in resource allocation problems, such as for
example in production planning. Mathematically speaking, by suitable differentiation, it
is possible to obtain the maximum and minimum values of any continuous function
involving two variables. If the function involves more than two variables, then partial
differentiation can be used.