Lately Asia-Pacific India, China and Singapore in particular are fast becoming the hub of development and testing for many of the multi-national corporations which earlier imported software engineers from here. Since a lot of these corporations are into developing products of their own, this brings in a whole new opportunity for the services project manager, Program Management.
This rise of product-oriented development executed by these corporations within this region has brought in the need for uniquely different project management skills.
It has also brought in some of the terms associated with job descriptions more prevalent in the regions where these corporations came in from.
A large Personal Computer manufacturer in US brings forward the issue of creating an online PC diagnostic controller framework in front of a Business Relationship Manager of a large Indian consulting company. The controller would allow them to test their PCs while not having physical access to them.
A team of software engineers from the software consulting company is already busy developing Linux and Windows based diagnostics for their PCs. Owing to time and cost constraints and in an effort to maximise revenue from this project, the Business Relationship Manager routes this case to a delivery centre head of the consulting company who is based in India. The centre head passes it to the Group Lead who realises that he has to pick up some experienced member from his team of 60 odd members to lead this project to completion.
The Group Lead finds that Mr. Ramesh is the right person for the job with his technical background in this domain and assigns the project to him. This would be his only project till delivery is finally accepted by the customer.
Ramesh communicates with the Business Relationship Manager and after this discussion realises that he would require a team of eight to ten software engineers within the 3-month deadline.
The Group Lead can only assign him five engineers at this time and two out of these would be fresh out of engineering school. One engineer would have to come in as Technical Lead from the onsite team which is developing diagnostics for the customer. Even for these resources, the Project Manager has to talk to other Project Managers via the Group Lead for getting technically competent staff.
Ramesh agrees for now and starts technical dialog with the customer through the Business Relationship Manager.
With the technical hurdles cleared, Ramesh knows that he would have to interact with the following project entities. The interface specifications, scope and technology have already been specified by the customer in the Statement of Work. The initial estimates are done by the Project Manager and communicated to Group Lead. They have to be retrofitted into the timelines suggested by the customer which means an average work week of over sixty hours for engineers and even more for the Project Manager over the project's development cycle.
The development takes place with risk, requirements and results consistently communicated to the customer's Program Manager and issues resolved when highlighted.
Technical issues are handled by the Technical Lead. Project resources, team management, customer communication and high-level technical inputs are maintained by the Project Manager. Project Manager and Tech Lead do the design while everybody codes and unit tests.
The documentation for the project is also undertaken by the project team itself. The processes for development and testing are very well defined in terms of expected metrics adherence. Once the controller has been developed, the integration testing is done by the development team itself.
The QA group ensures that the project related metrics are in conformance to the centre level ones so that the quality certifications can be maintained. For this there are quite a few activities the project team is supposed to perform and metrics they have to capture. Once internal tests are successful, the Project Manager travels onsite to the customer site for acceptance testing.
When the customer's Program Manager has accepted the deliverables, he fill the customer satisfaction survey and return to the Business Relationship Manager who passes it to the Group Lead and finally the Project Manager.
The Project Manager gives his inputs to the Group Lead on each of the team members which would be used during the annual performance appraisal cycle.
His role is over and the team is disbanded. The Group Lead assigns him another new project. The E-team at the product company comes up with a corporate strategy to enter the Linux market. It is evident that the corporate global systems need to be geared to support the product availability and support for the target market before the product is ready. The strategic milestones are set and communicated. One of the required components is the Download Manager which would be able to service the Linux community.
The Head of the relevant Business Unit BU pitches to the corporate strategy team and secures the work. There is a strategic fit for the component in the business unit. While all resources might not be available in this group, it will be managed by a Program Manager who reports into this business unit. In most cases, the Program Manager is already managing several other projects which are in a similar domain.
Thus the Program Manager is empowered with the project charter of having this component made available and supported. The BU head pulls in Mr. Ramesh, the Program Manager who reports to him and asks him to come up with various teams that need to inter-work to deliver. Rest of the interfaces have to be worked out by the Program Manager. The Program Manager receives the very limited set of documents that have been developed by the remote team based in US which had initially developed the Download Manager for the Windows and Macintosh platforms.
There is an understanding which needs to be developed about the people, processes and deliverables. It is soon realised that there was a very lightweight process that was being followed earlier.
This is common to most product companies working in an environment where market requirements are changing dynamically. The Program Manager realises that there is a major personal effort which would be required since the limited time and fixed cost model in which he has to deliver has also to take into consideration for an agile development methodology and low process-orientation.
Based on past experience and discussion with some of the stakeholders, he foresees that these are the following teams he would have to work with over the estimated nine month Product Life Cycle. These teams are located in India as well as multiple locations in US.
Thus there are multiple potential challenges. A kick-off meeting is followed by a Project Plan which clearly highlighted the team members, roles, responsibilities, work breakdown structure and timelines. The subsidiary technical plans were based on inputs from that particular technical team. Example is Configuration Management plan from the Engineering Manager. This clearly sets the tone for integration and escalation paths.
The Program Manager works with the Product Manager from the products teams and also inputs from engineering manager's teams participating in this effort on features and their priorities for the current release of the component.
A Product Lifecycle PLC is chosen which is suitable for the type of component and the timeframe in which it is to be developed, documented, tested, deployed and supported before work on its next release can begin. The technology options are open-ended as long as they serve the purpose of the accepted requirements.
During development, constant communication is passed from the Engineering via the Program Manager so that any changes, requirements from other teams can be assessed in real time. If any change requests come in, they are handled by a Bug Review Council which is usually led by the Program Manager. The geographically distributed nature of this development makes the communication task extremely challenging. This would allow the localised builds to be created with minimum development effort once the framework is in place.
In obtaining these estimates, the structure of fertility of the National Survey of Fertility and Health and the program projections of women by ages of the National Population Council and the National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and were considered. The TARGET model was used to estimate the numbers of women in union using different modern methods who would need to be served by family planning programs in order to meet the proposed total fertility rates.
The public sector has replaced the private as the major source of family planning services. The other 3 public sector institutions will maintain their current level of coverage. The private sector has played a smaller role in family planning in Mexico than in many other countries, and the state will thus have the major responsibility for service provision, including family planning education, promotion, and counseling of prospective clients.
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