The project manager's toolkit : practical checklists for systems development / David M. Shailer.

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

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.