Process Centric Business Case Analysis for Easing Software Project Management Challenges

Software Project management involves coordinating various aspects of a project in order to bring forth a positive result. There have been increasing challenges faced by Project Managers. The major challenges of project management include unrealistic deadlines, communication deficit, uncertain dependencies, failure to manage risk and invisibility of the intermediate products. Meeting these challenges is very difficult and in many cases they are not met which eventually leads to the project failure. This situation is even worse where project dispersion is high. Different studies reveal that an IT project is more likely to be unsuccessful than successful and 7 out of 10 IT projects fail in some respect. The process centric work breakdown structure (WBS) can play a very vital role in this regard to improve the situations significantly. Instead of work breakdown structures as a tree, the proposed process centric WBS takes whole software production process and splits whole process into smaller process units which take right set of inputs with the right set of standard, put right set of practices in place that eventually produce the work products with required standards and quality. This process centric work breakdown structure helps Project Managers plan, estimate, monitor, and control the project activities in greater accuracy and efficiency. In this article, Business Case Analysis phase of software projects has been taken as an example to demonstrate process centric concept of WBS to deal with project management challenges.