Project Manager's Toolkit Book

	Computer Weekly Professional Series
	Preface
	Acknowledgements
1	Project Inception Checklists	1
1.1	Getting the project kick-off meeting right	2
1.2	Five key areas to understand when starting a project	4
1.3	Dealing with hidden agendas - where to start	6
1.4	How to do a simple risk assessment	8
1.5	Twelve project procedures to have in place before you start	10
1.6	Determining the big three - targets, timescales and budgets	12
1.7	Nine tell-tale signs of a project nightmare	14
1.8	How long is a piece of software?	16
1.9	How should I staff a project?	20
1.10	Project trade-offs - how to tease them out upfront	23
1.11	What sort of project lifecycle should I adopt?	25
1.12	Make or buy - deciding the package or bespoke development question	29
1.13	Some do's and don'ts of package selection	33
2	Project Control Checklists	35
2.1	Five things to be checked throughout the project lifecycle	36
2.2	Spotting a project runaway before it happens	38
2.3	Three key communication issues to get right	40
2.4	How to cut a project down to size	42
2.5	How to avoid wasting time on things that don't matter	45
2.6	Different ways of generating solutions for a problem	47
2.7	Setting up a document-naming standard	52
2.8	How do I manage a piece of software?	55
3	Business Analysis Checklists	59
3.1	Nine key questions for high-level business understanding	60
3.2	How do we analyse our relationship with our customers?	63
3.3	Fourteen common business problems - spotting which ones are yours	65
3.4	Where business analysis usually goes wrong	66
3.5	What are the steps to analyse a business process?	68
3.6	What are the techniques for describing a business process?	71
3.7	Four problems with business process diagrams and how to fix them	73
3.8	Quality checks for a business process model	75
3.9	How to identify what's bad in a business process	76
3.10	Clarifying the business goal	80
3.11	Ways of picking a business-modelling technique	82
3.12	Four key areas to a process	84
3.13	Lines of questioning for a business process	86
3.14	How to choose between alternative solutions for changing a business process	90
3.15	Checking the redesigned process	92
3.16	Business process redesign - power tool #1 - partnering	95
3.17	Business process redesign - power tool #2 - IT	97
4	Business Requirements Checklists	99
4.1	Prototyping for requirements the big issues	100
4.2	Six steps in a requirements-gathering prototype	102
4.3	Easy things to miss in gathering requirements	104
4.4	What documents should I produce?	106
4.5	How good is my Business Requirements Specification?	110
5	Systems Analysis Checklists	113
5.1	What should be in a methodology?	114
5.2	How do you make a methodology?	116
5.3	Moving from current physical to current logical	119
5.4	System boundary analysis for requirements	121
5.5	Functional priority analysis - applying the 80:20 rule	123
5.6	Shortcuts to move from business process analysis to systems analysis	126
5.7	What's in a system specification?	128
5.8	General quality checks for a system specification	131
5.9	Checking a logical design	133
5.10	Six steps to first-cut data requirements	136
5.11	How to do data modelling	138
5.12	Object orientation development steps for a data-centric approach	142
6	System Build Checklists	147
6.1	What logical data models get wrong (and have to be put right)	148
6.2	Database physicalization - five areas of useful tips and tricks	153
6.3	Seventeen quality checks for a physical data model	156
6.4	What modules to add into every application build	157
6.5	Individual module quality - key questions to ask	161
6.6	Transactions and how to design them	163
6.7	What to include in common error detection and handling	165
6.8	How to distribute modules to servers	167
6.9	Finding the big four performance bottlenecks	169
6.10	Why projects don't achieve software reuse	172
6.11	How to find the causes of extremely elusive errors	174
6.12	four standards to apply to the user interface	176
7	QA and Testing Checklists	179
7.1	Establishing the need for testing and QA	180
7.2	Setting the scope for testing - avoiding the bottomless pit	181
7.3	Ensuring a mix of testing types is present in a project	183
7.4	What to test at two key milestones of a project	186
7.5	Setting up the test team - personnel and policies	188
7.6	What test documentation should I maintain for application testing?	190
7.7	Where to get test data from for application testing	195
7.8	General tests to apply to a screen	197
7.9	How to generate test data for screen fields (domains)	199
7.10	How to prioritize errors and grade the acceptance of functions	201
7.11	Power testing 1 - checking the underlying database	203
7.12	Power testing 2 - thrashing and crashing the system	205
7.13	Power testing 3 - checking the business controls	207
8	System Implementation Checklists	209
8.1	Change-auditing and change-capacity assessment - how to see the big picture	210
8.2	Things to plan for in an implementation	214
8.3	Adopting the NASA go/no-go list	221
8.4	How to build a training course	223
8.5	Seven pillars of a service level agreement	229
8.6	What to look at when capacity planning	232
8.7	How to do a data conversion	234
8.8	Nine important documents to hand over from development to the support team	238
8.9	Assessing the long-term viability of a system	240
8.10	After implementation - living with the system	243
8.11	Questions to ask at the post-implementation review	244