[in Japanese]

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To upgrade a project management process, it is effective to support the management of the pre-project phase (the inquiry, the estimate, and the contract). For that, we have developed a system that presents works that have to be executed in pre-project according to characteristics of an individual project. Concretely, we have defined the pre-project standard WBS, and checklists that extract work items corresponding to project characteristics. Moreover we have developed a experimental system, and a trial to a real project began.

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One of the major causes of project failure is that customer's requirement is not well understood and described. The project, in which the requirement definition, the specification change, and the scope change are mainly handled by the customer and the project team is passive, has higher possibility of failure. To derive the customer's real requirements in early phase is a key to lead the project to the success. The author discusses methods to mitigate the project risks caused by scope change, by predicting coming new requirements through the communication with the customer.

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This study investigated actions of high-level project managers who attained substantial profit and their frequency in the pre-first meeting stage, in the first meeting, and in the middle stage of the project. Factor analysis identified seven factors in the pre-first meeting stage, another seven in the first meeting, and fourteen in the middle stage. Analysis as to characteristics of the eminent high-level project managers who attained substantial profit and undertook difficult projects revealed that their characteristics were salient in the pre-first meeting stage and the middles stage. They asked for cooperation and commitment of relevant divisions and made use of previous and on-going similar cases more often than the other project managers did in the pre-first meeting stage. As well, they tried to make democratic atmosphere and controlled changes of rules carefully to facilitate and keep flexible and clear project environment more often. These results imply that high-level project managers adapting to changing situation make continuous effort to build a goal-directed team of project members and stakeholders and that this effort leads them to high performance.

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Our company was facing to the troubles from the second half of fiscal 2003 through 2004, that number of system development projects fell into deficit situation. The troubles mostly came from poor estimate skill, project management and information technology skill. Focusing to avoid the estimate skill-oriented troubles, projects that exceed the certain amount of cost in estimate are regularly forced to have an estimate review meeting before submitting to customers. In the meetings we found some estimates had the problems of lack of some terms in the estimate specification, insufficient risk management, vague cost calculation basis, and so on. In order to solve these problems, we thought it was vital that those who can prepare an estimate obtain the skills of preparing a high quality estimate specification and good negotiation skills for mutual agreement with customers. For such a purpose we set up the estimate skill training course. In this paper we report the execution of the estimate skill training course and its results. Further more in near future we are planning to set up the advanced course to perform good negotiation for mutual agreement with customers.

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Measurements calculated by dividing project size by development effort are commonly used to evaluate productivity. Although such measurements are simple and clear to understand, the overall accuracy is very poor. In order to address this poor accuracy, we have introduced four methods for productivity evaluation based on combinations of source lines of code and development effort. We have completed a quantitative review of the methods in terms of accuracy and clarity using actual data from completed projects and studied possible implementation in various occasions. In this paper, we describe the results of the review and study.

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We have been studying methods for evaluation of productivity improvement effected by inserting new technology to software development processes. In this paper, we describe new productivity metrics, which uses estimates effort derived from results of completed projects. We have applied both the new metrics and a conventional productivity metrics calculated from software size and project effort to evaluate productivities of actual projects and carried out a comparative analysis of the productivity evaluations.

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The software productivity is used as one of the quantitative management indices in the software development project. The software productivity is influenced from an evaluation of the productivity improvement measure and a new project according to various factors such as the development environments and member skill besides the accuracy of the scale and the man-hour that is a basic standard though it is used by it when it estimates and the plan is settled on. Therefore, when the difference of the software productivity is large in each project, and it evaluates and the actual number value is used, the point that should be noted is abundant. In this text, it reports on a concrete evaluation, the analysis, and the use case with the software productivity index in our company.

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We popularized the Function Point method in our office, in order to prevent scale underestimation which affects the estimate of the cost. This time, we made the comparative analysis about the project which used Function Point method, and the project which did not use Function Point method, in order to take out the improvement point of Function Point method. We represent effectivity of the Function Point method, issues to leverage the Function Point method, and consideration for estimation improvement.

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In IT infrastructure building projects, there are not generalized human resource estimation model because there is no calculation base like application program code. Inaccurate human resource estimation would be one of the causes of the project failure, so the objective human resource estimation metrics is required. This paper proposes the approximate human resource estimation model in the initiation phase. The metrics we propose are listed below: (1) Analyze the project to identify the project size and the factors of difficulty (2) Transform the factors of difficulty to size using the coefficient of difficulty (3) Calculate the total human resources with the project size and the size of difficulty which was transformed. The resource is calculated by the model created by analyzing the actual projects. This metrics was applied to the resource estimation for the actual project and verified the effectiveness with the result.

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In the software development project, it is one of the important factors for success to estimate the project size appropriately. However estimation by SE s with their intuition and experience brings big difference in many cases. To reduce this difference, there is the function point (FP) method as one of objective and necessary estimate techniques. Authors have verified and considered what is necessary to bring the FP measurement value of the software project size close to the result value at the completion. In the number of projects of the manufacturing industry system, the project size was measured with the function point of simple and easy means and the measurement accuracy was calculated at the project completion stage. Moreover, in another project, the project size was measured with the function point of simple and easy means several times between the initial stage and the completion stage according to the progress of the project, and the measurement result was verified. As a result, we establish the verification method to improve the estimate accuracy, and we calculate the coefficient to bring the result of the measurement by the estimated function point count close.

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It is not easy for IT projects to apply EVM methodology because project data collection is not sufficiently controlled. On the other hand, Cost-of-Quality has been managed from recognition of the importance of quality. This article presents new quality-value focused EVM method, which support project visualization and control from the integrated viewpoint of quality, cost, and schedule. It is possible to interpret Quality-Value in conformity with management data which could be different depending on project management maturity levels. Finally, some cases applied to actual projects are introduced and the effectiveness of this method is explained.

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A project of the system development stands up, and, in a process of upper reaches, it occurs a lot from past development experience to delay from an original master schedule. For such situation, myself was concerned as charge to promote a project and performed the observation of the on-site atmosphere, the hearing from the on-site person in charge why such a problem occurred. As a result of having heard it, there was the problem of technology/the skill, but understood a thing with a great many problems to affect information sharing. I report, in addition, what kind of measures I carried out what kind of problem there was from these results.

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This case covers a systems development project, which experienced sharp degradation of quality right after completion of a large module by adding a mass of manpower to the project. A project review revealed that there was a problem in the development process that heavily relied on specific key persons in the project. In order to solve this problem, we implemented several measures for reorganizing the project, such as working on fundamentals of the project, establishing a standard development process and improving quality and costs. As a result, we managed to deliver quality systems of 300ks in six months. In this paper, we describe lessons leaned from our reorganization approach of the project.

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Our business is to develop and operate mission-critical systems for financial institutions. In December 2006 and January 2007, we repeatedly experienced serious troubles in a project. As a result, the client lost confidence in our performance, and the client itself nearly lost its customer's faith. In order to overcome the troubled situation, we implemented measures for improving systems and operations quality. We also had sessions with external consultants to change the organization's existing business culture. Although these are ongoing measures, we have achieved some good results, which are explained in this paper.

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Understanding the essence of the failure experience and learning lessons from the failure experience are important to create knowledge. We think that our organization can strengthen the project management by learning from failure experience in past projects and sharing precepts in the organization. To learn from failure experience, we should utilization of the failure experience in project management. Our approach assumes the assessment activity by Project Management Office in an ongoing project. We surveyed on current assessment activity, and found the following issues. (1) How should assessment persons understand the situation in the project? Not every assessor has the ability to clarify all the aspects in the project. Often an assessor does not have enough information to verify the effectiveness of a countermeasure. (2) How should assessment parsons find information the project manager needs in the project? To solve above issues, we defined format to descriptive the situation in the project and search strategy of information the project manager needs.

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In companies and organizations with many systems development projects, prevention of making failed projects is a critical issue. Although many companies implement risk management in an effort to solve this issue, some projects still fail. In this paper, we analyze characteristics of difficult projects and discuss how we can distinguish risks from the common characteristics, assess and address the risks. In addition, we present necessity for early detection of risks in projects.

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Based on the investigation of the project failures experienced in NEC, it has been found that most of the cause has been induced during high level study and/or design phase at the early stage of the project, or even the time before the project start. In these cases,it is very difficult to cope with the problems with in the single project. In this paper, authers consider that OPM3 (Organizational Project Management Maturity Model) is an effective tool to provide some solution to the problems and discuss its effectiveness.

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Contract schemes between project owners and contractors have been classified into two typical categories: Lump Sum Turn Key (LSTK) and Cost Reimbursable. In recent years, however, a new type of contract scheme called "Convertible LSTK" has been being adopted for some major plant engineering/construction projects and recognized for its effectiveness. Its role to mitigate project risks is analyzed, and its implications to the IT and other industries are also discussed.

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The authors have developed the Project Portal for improving efficiency of project management tasks. In the operation of the tool, the requirements for the next project management have been gathered, then we have found most project managers have wide needs to such extents, the method to solve problems of the project management, support projects start-up, and availability of the internal systems outside the company etc. In this paper we describe the case implemented the real requirements for the project management as systematically as possible.

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An effective promotion measure has not been found yet though the personality is a critical factor for the project manager. I worry whether the promotion is very difficult for important of project manager's personality being emphasized. In this text, it proposes "Project Manager's Feedback Report" as an effective means to educate project manager's personality.

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Although many books are available for learning project management theory, only theoretical knowledge is not adequate to resolve the variety of actual problems occurring in a real project. Practical knowledge acquired from PM experience is essential for actual project management. From an educational point of view, this paper describes how practical knowledge can be transferred to younger potential project managers combined with theoretical knowledge. First, improving the management ability, management areas to be focused are determined and then "A Handbook of Project Management for IT System Integration", which other department in our company uses practically, is adopted as a textbook. Education programs are prepared and applied to prospective project managers as trainees. Trainees discuss several issues on the textbook, and senior project managers advise on the basis of their experience. Evaluation by questionnaire suggests that trainees have noticed the importance of communication management, and that virtual experience is very effective for making prospective project managers step up.

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Toward requirements about innovation, about huge development scope, about complexity and about the return of investment, a project manager will be always expected to achieve objectives effectively by planning, organizing teams, demonstrating leadership and controlling. A PM is requested technical knowledge as well as managing wisdom to handle unexpected risks and conflicts between experts, between existing organizations or existing hierarchy. There are many trainings and educations offered to respond the demand of these various capability needed. However, it's not so easy to cultivate capable resources. I intend to discuss from the point of individual PM's view to improve these competencies. I will express a tentative idea about self-training motivated by one's self inspired by the PM competency development framework.

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It is proposed that "Community" is one of effective mechanism to increase project manager's competency level. However a definition of Community and an operation of the community are not well organized, thus taking various styles and forms. Effectiveness of the community is not clearly measured because of its difficulty in continuous management of cross-departmental functions. Moreover, it is not clear the skills and motivation which are needed for community members. This paper discusses a type of "Community" formation and its effectiveness from the viewpoint of an organization. It is based on the example of the community currently carried out in the company or the public organization. Furthermore, competency and motivation required in order to activate a community are considered from an individual viewpoint. Based on these considerations, I propose the improvement of business activity of a project and the improvement in capability of a project manager which utilized the community.

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In our PM development programs with mentoring methods, participants of the programs are highly satisfied with the program. At the same time, however, most of the participants express their concerns about their own carrier development as PM. Our observations show that they do not have a clear image of an "ideal PM" and simply perform their tasks with no specific carrier guideline and development target. We believe that these are underlying factors of their concerns. In response to this, we have developed a new mentoring program that uses ideas of carrier management to enable participants to draw clear images as PM, adjust their carrier directions to capabilities required by the company, draw and monitor a plan to achieve their own carrier target. In this paper, we summarize the implementation and the review of our new program and clarify effect and future tasks of the program.

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The improvement activity in the brokerage department and the manufacturing division evaluates the result such as the sales improvements and shortening at the production lead time easily, and a target of project clarification and the maintenance of motivation are comparatively easy. On the other hand, the improvement activity that improves customer satisfaction measurement evaluates by an immediate effect and is also difficult the maintenance of and target clarification and motivation. The experience of the execution of the project management under such an environment by the business is based and it examines it.

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It is important to prevent project failures by Risk Management and Lessons learned. However, there is a tendency to exaggerate the benefit of them. In the Study of Failure, it is insisted on Failure prevention by Cause analysis. Although that is a plausible thinking, we must pay attention to cases which knowledge gained after the event is mixed in such kind of knowledge distributed. In this paper, the author consider that Ethics view-point is available for suggestion to provide solution to these problems and try to discuss its benefit.

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The purpose of this research is to propose the stake-holder management by making of the requirement definition exquisite. The stake-holder management is classified into making of the requirement definition exquisite, the progress management which customer needs are considered, and the introduction of the problem solving system into the project management. In the research, the features of the failure of many projects are investigated, and then the relationship between the results of failure analysis and the project management body of knowledge are analyzed. Next, both techniques the design to customer needs and the purpose measure diagram are applied into the decision of the requirement definition. In the research, the new technique for the decision of requirement definition is proposed.

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We may have the image of the stake-holder as the key person of the customer, sponsor or company director. It is of course that they are the very important stake-holders, but the project-team-members are also important stake-holders for the smooth project implementation. In this paper I will make a study on the stake-holder management focused on the project-team-member as follows;

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For the management of the software development projects, the project managers (PMs) need to detect the fatal project risks as early as possible and to do something. They first list the possible problems and manage them as the risk items of their projects. In usual projects, PMs often list the project risk items at the beginning of their projects by referring to the problems of the previous relational projects. However, even the veteran PMs of the projects may make leaky lists of the project risk items. In this paper, we propose the support system for listing the project risk items. The system extracts high possible problems of the new project from the minutes of its previous similar projects and gives them to the users. The users list the project risk items referring to the output of the system at the beginning of the project. In the result of our evaluation experiment, we found that PMs can reduce the leaky lists of the projects risk items by using the traditional way of listing in combination with the proposal system.

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In this paper, I study the risk identification method using the model of the company activity. This method is used to identify the risk of ERM (Enterprise Risk Management). It is assumed that the risk of ERM obstructs a business purpose. Therefore the various Risk Identification is necessary. It will be expected difficult only to use the risk categories and the check list by experience. So I make the risk categories and the check list to use in risk identification from the model of the company activity. And I consider the improved method of the exhaustive degree of the risk identification of ERM. I suggest the main subject about the elements becoming basic and the way of thinking of the model to distinguish a risk from a model of the company activity.

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Embedded systems such as household electric appliances are required to retain a high standard of quality such as safety and usability. Then, those systems are tested thoroughly. But, this trends leads redesign of those systems and causes bad influences of cost and delivery. Then, we have researched the reasons of exchanging of the specification about some projects for development of embedded software delayed of delivery date. The results of the research shows that the major reason of exchanging of the specifications are mismatch of non-functional requirement of systems and design of the software when the behavior of the systems deviated from correct behavior. Therefore, in this paper, we show a quality management process that focuses non-functional requirements and a methodology for the process. Furthermore, we show an experiment for confirming the effects of the process and methodology.

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We are Zone evaluation of a new methodology to analyze the objective and quantitative data on the quality of the software products and their functional components Zone Evaluation enables to evaluate the quality of software products as well as their development process based on the product size, the number of test cases and the number of detected defects. The number of defects remaining in the software product can be estimated based on the distribution of the evaluated data comparing with the cumulated evaluation results. In this paper we describe the method of evaluation, estimation of the number of remaining defects, problem to be solved and the future direction to extend this tool, based on the results collected from the software testing stage.

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As for the activity that aims at productivity in the software development and the improvement of the quality, various approaches are taken. We introduce the idea of Project Management that reflects the content of the evaluation in each development process by evaluating the complexity of software under design process. Our system is a large-scale built-in software for communication systems, and it improves the efficiency of the entire development process by evaluating and analyzing the structure and the interface of software in the middle of the development process, it aims at the quality assurances, and we expect the improvement of Project Management. The position where software was evaluated was assumed to be a location to the middle of a design process and a testing process, and it was borne in mind objectively appreciable of the factor by an electronic data processing system.

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As one of the important elements which influence a success and failure of a project, team management attracts attention. In today's world, projects become more complex and much larger. So a project manager (PM) should have all leadership capabilities in order to build/keep high teamwork. In general, it is very difficult that a project manager owns, in oneself, every leadership capability that is indispensable for performing a project. That is, most project managers have incomplete leadership capabilities. According to the situation of a team (namely, project team life cycle), it is necessary to get some important leadership capabilities in order to perform a project. We consider a project team life cycle that dividing into five stages is appropriate based on precedence research. We have researched required leadership capabilities according to each of these stages for years. We view leadership as a set of four capabilities: sense making, relating, visioning, and inventing. This paper reports the application result in a certain project.

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