Introducing the Quantitative Project Management in Small and Medium-

sized Software Enterprises

Ivan Garcia1, Carla Pacheco1 and Jose A. Calvo-Manzano2

1 Postgraduate Division, Universidad Tecnológica de Mixteca,

69000 Oaxaca, Mexico

{ivan, leninca}@mixteco.utm.mx 2 Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid,

28660 Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain

jacalvo@fi.upm.es

Abstract. Taking into account that small and medium enterprises make up 99.85% of Mexican businesses, it

is vital that they implement the processes involved in project management. Although there are process models

and tools that cover project management, they are generally oriented to larger enterprises. So it is necessary to

adapt them to the particular necessities of small and medium-sized software enterprises. To ease an

effectively support these tasks, the FQPMSE is proposed: a framework for achieving quantitative project

management in small enterprises. Finally, experimentation results are provided through the FQPMSE

implementation in three software companies.

Keywords: Project management, software process improvement, process asset library, measurement

repository, small and medium-sized software enterprises.

1 Introduction

The “software crisis” of 1969 has lasted until the present, with the same old causes of project failure. The

lack of management is confirmed by Chow and Cao (2008) and Patanakul et al. (2012) as one of the key causes

of project failure. Distinguishing the problem, Collyer and Warren (2009) have identified three principal causes

of failure and delays in software projects: inaccurate estimates, poor communication of project status, and lack of

historical information. These are key issues in the areas of project planning, and project monitoring and control.

Collyer and Warren also hold that these causes can be eliminated through an adequate project management

process. However, almost all research has been focused exclusively on a technical approach; developing

methodologies and tools like Primavera P6, Deltek Open Plan, Microsoft Project, and researches as ACO (Ant

Colony Optimization) algorithm (Abdallah et al., 2009) and the combination of contemporary and traditional

project management tools (Herbert and Deckro, 2011) which cover only issues related to software project

planning and monitoring. Nevertheless, none of these initiatives have considered topics such as:

The establishment and maintenance of a set of organizational process assets: standard project

management process, description of lifecycle models, guidelines and criteria for tailoring the standard

project management process, organizational measurement repository, and the repository of assets and

learned lessons (according to CMMI-DEV v1.2 (2006) the Definition of project management

processes).

The establishment of project management processes for each project. These processes are tailored from

the set of organizational process assets of project management (according to CMMI-DEV v1.2 the

Integrated project management process).

The definitions of practices that help the organization to plan, implement and deploy the process

improvements, taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s project

management process asset library (according to CMMI-DEV v1.2 the improvement of project

management processes, considering the human factor to achieve the organizational deployment).

The definition of quantitative models, which enable project managers to predict the future behavior of

projects (in terms of process performance and product quality) through the use of organizational

historical information and by providing improvement information (according to CMMI-DEV v1.2 the

Quantitative project management).

In this context, from the beginning of the 90s, industry and researchers interested in Software Engineering

have been expressing special interest in solving this problem with Software Process Improvement (SPI) (Pino et

al., 2008). An indicator of this interest is the increasing number of international initiatives related to SPI, such as

CMMI-DEV v1.2 and v1.3, ISO/IEC 15504:2004 Part 4 (ISO, 2004) (previously known as SPICE), and

ISO/IEC 12207:2008 (ISO, 2008). However, the definition of methods that guide the development and

implementation of effective practices have not been researched. The interest in software improvement initiatives

in large enterprises is now being extended to small and medium enterprises. Nevertheless, the problem is the

high implementation cost, independently of the size of the company; but the situation in small enterprises is still

more difficult because the implementation of an effective software process in any company requires a huge

investment in time and money (Mondragon, 2006; Lester et al., 2010; Zhang and Shao, 2011).

This restlessness in SPI that began in large companies has recently moved to Small and Medium-sized

software Enterprises (SMEs). In Mexico, in January 2012 there were almost 3 million SMEs that accounted for

99.85 % of all companies. With this information we were able to determine the importance of SMEs at the

macroeconomic levels. However, as models have been developed for large enterprises, unfortunately only a few

studies have focused on their effective practice in small enterprises; only a few SMEs know about them. Even in

the case where a small enterprise knows the models and recognizes the need to improve its processes, the

principal disadvantage is its resources (financial and human) which are limited (Espinosa-Curiel et al., 2012).

Considering the arguments previously illustrated, this article aims to show an alternative approach for defining

the project management processes in software SMEs, taking into account affordable costs for this kind of

organization. The rest of the paper is organized in six sections. Following this introduction, Section 2 presents

the background on project management process in the context of a software company; why these companies

searched high maturity levels and related works are also described. Section 3 describes the FQPMSE and gives

an overview of how it works. Section 4 presents one case study defined for three Mexican enterprises where this

framework was applied and finally, Section 5 presents the paper’s conclusions.

2 The Project Management Process

The project management process covers the project management activities related to planning, monitoring,

and controlling the project. According to CMMI-DEV v1.2, the Project Management process involves the

following process areas: Project Planning (PP), Project Monitoring and Control (PMC), Integrated Project

Management (IPM), Risk Management (RSKM) and Quantitative Project Management (QPM).

The basic project management processes (PP and PMC) address the activities related to establishing and

maintaining the project plan, establishing and maintaining commitments, monitoring progress against the plan

and taking corrective action. These basic process areas can be defined as follows:

The Project Planning process area begins with requirements that define the product and project. The

project plan covers the various project management and development activities performed by the

project. The project reviews other plans that affect the project from various relevant stakeholders and

establishes commitments with those stakeholders for their contributions to the project.

The Project Monitoring and Control process area includes monitoring activities and taking corrective

action. The project plan specifies the appropriate level of project monitoring, the frequency of progress

reviews, and the measures used to monitor progress. Progress is determined primarily by comparing the

project status to the plan. When the actual status deviates significantly from the expected values,

corrective action is taken as appropriate. These actions may include replanning.

The advanced project management processes (IPM, RSKM, QPM) address activities such as establishing a

defined process that is tailored to the organization’s existing set of standard processes, establishing the project

work environment from the organization’s own work environment standards, coordinating and collaborating

with relevant stakeholders, managing risk, forming and sustaining integrated teams for the conduct of projects,

and quantitatively managing the project’s defined process. These process areas can be defined as follows:

The Integrated Project Management process establishes and maintains the project’s defined process that

is tailored to the organization’s own set of standard processes. The project is managed using the

project’s defined process. The project uses and contributes to the organization’s process assets. The

management of the project ensures that the relevant stakeholders associated with the project coordinate

their efforts in a timely manner.

Although risk identification and monitoring are covered in the Project Planning and Project Monitoring

and Control processes, the Risk Management process takes a continuing, forward-looking approach to

managing risks with activities that include identification of risk parameters, risk assessments, and risk

mitigation.

The Quantitative Project Management process area applies quantitative and statistical techniques to

manage process-performance and product quality. Quality and process-performance objectives for the

project are based on the objectives established by the organization. The project’s defined process

comprises, in part, process elements and subprocesses whose performance can be predicted. At a

minimum, the process variation experienced by subprocesses critical to achieving the project’s quality

and performance objectives is understood. Corrective action is taken when special causes of process

variation are identified.

In this context, FQPMSE enables SMEs to achieve managed, defined, and quantitatively managed levels on

project management process using a conceptual framework and a software engineering environment.

2.2 Related work

With regard to research on models that directly improve the implementation of project management process

in SMEs, various proposals have emerged in recent years. The methodology presented in (Bibi et al., 2009), for

example, uses Bayesian Belief Networks to represent the relationships among implementation, product and

process metrics and their impact on the development effort. The study presented in (Wang et al., 2011) presents a

concise and practical method on development of small and medium software. Combining process management

and document management, the authors rationally use QA (Quality Assurance), CVS (Concurrent Versions

System), Checksheet and other management mechanisms to include the compilation of different documents and

codes into a unified process in SMEs. The experience concept is explored in research by (Garg et al., 2010)

presenting the influence of the best practices of software development and project management on software

projects, especially in SMEs, considering a strong relation between software success and the success of any

business process.

When considering the application of software tools and techniques for software project management, it is

worth noting the studies presented in (Rivas et al., 2010) and (O’Sheedy et al., 2010). The first study argues that

these tools must be selected according to the needs and characteristics of each company, especially when

resources are limited, which is rather common for SMEs. On the other hand, the second study presents the

preliminary research findings of an investigation on agile and traditional project management techniques adapted

to an SME environment. The research was undertaken using a qualitative approach, implementing an action

research methodology, over a ten-month period in an SME environment in Vienna, Austria. A framework was

developed for the implementation of IT projects and it was supported by a tool for project managers.

With regard to works related to studies for analyzing the nature of the project management process, the

research by (Turner et al., 2010) identifies the context of project management required by SMEs. In this sense,

authors interviewed people from companies of the three sizes of SME, micro, small and medium, from a range of

industries and from four countries. The main differences occurred by size of company and country. According to

authors, all three sizes of company wanted less bureaucratic versions of project management than traditional

forms, but medium-sized companies, where people fulfill more specialist roles, need more structure than small

and micro companies. The aspects set out above justify the definition of a Framework for achieving quantitative

project management in SMEs, which would add more details to the activities of project planning, and monitoring

and control of the project management process.

3 FQPMSE components

The main components of FQPMSE are a conceptual framework and a software engineering environment. The

FQPMSE Conceptual Framework provides the support necessary for the representation and management of the

knowledge related to the project management processes from the quantitative and integration perspectives. The

FQPMSE conceptual metadata architecture is composed by four abstraction layers. The aim of this architecture

is to provide the integration management of the project management and quantitative topic by representing the

elements related to different abstraction layers. This integration is carried out by including the pattern element

necessary to define the current processes, the process models of the entities and the required information to

represent any software process-related entity (process models, projects, products, metrics, phases, activities)

which can be candidate for management. In this architecture the concrete models for the definition and

measurement of software processes (level 2) are also included. FQPMSE proposes the introduction of a Process

Assets Library (PAL) to achieve a capability level 3. In the experience of almost all organizations which are in

advanced maturity/capability levels, the definition and implementation of a well structured and organized PAL is

the key that enables organizations to have a culture focused on the maturity of their processes (Jones, 2006).

Our PAL is a common repository of data (assets) that enables process standardization because all projects can

use the same standard process (lifecycle model) or different approved adaptations of the standard process. The

metrics establish the organizational measurement repository that contains data of the process, product and task

(planned and actual) from the different projects performed in the organization. Every project selects from our

PAL its own process (defined process for project management) considering the tailoring criteria and guidelines.

The defined process is used by projects to update (feedback) the assets library at two levels: at process, product

and task level with actual measures, and at the improvement level with lessons learned and their improvements.

In the case of the project management area, our PAL stores in the measurement repository the estimated and real

values of efforts regarding the different tasks of projects. If we consider that software projects follow a defined

standard process, different software projects can apply the same tasks and use statistical analysis to estimate the

performance in future projects with historical data.

The FQPMSE software engineering environment is composed of two integrated tools which provide the

technological support to the conceptual framework: PALSS (PAL for Small Software enterprises) for the

definition and management of the conceptual architecture, and PROMEP (Project Management based on

Effective Practices) to support the project management using the defined patterns. PALSS is extended with new

tools for the support of the evaluation of the processes (see Garcia et al., 2010). All the metadata managed by the

tools are stored in a repository which allows the sharing of all the overall software process information and

knowledge. In this sense, the three main elements which constitute the FQPMSE software engineering

environment are:

a) A metadata repository. The metadata representation at different abstraction levels is the most suitable

means to handle the complexity and diversity of the information needed to support the definition and

evaluation of the software processes.

b) A software measurement repository. In order to provide the quantitative support necessary for the

project management, the measurement repository must be represented by using a consistent metamodel.

c) A scoreboard. One of the objectives of FQPMSE is to provide a mechanism for knowledge management

in software projects and to redefine some activities of the project managers for obtaining a better

control in the project lifecycle, where the associated risks are more significant. The scoreboard

contemplates capability levels 1 and 2 of project management (project planning as well as project

monitoring and control) in CMMI-DEV v1.2 continuous representation with the purpose of introducing

better visibility for controlling the project and to effectively handle the associated risks. And the levels

3 and 4 will allow to define a quantitatively controlled process.

d) Software tool for project management. The aim of the FQPMSE’ software tool is to provide the support

for the definition of an effective project management process - from the proper software process model

to any entity of interest related to it - and the support for the measurement of such elements. With this

goal, two software prototypes have been developed: PROMEP which supports the definition of a

project management process according to the SE necessities, and SysProVAL (Garcia et al., 2011), for

evaluating and improving the software process in small organizations.

With the framework proposed, the management and measurement of software processes is supported by

including a data repository in which a knowledge base of the process management is established oriented to its

evaluation and improvement.

4 Case study

The case study was focused in the application of FQPMSE in three Mexican SMEs. These enterprises,

denominated SE1, SE2, and SE3 for confidentially reasons, were created in 2003, 2005, and 2006, respectively.

Table 1 summarizes the staff size and the main activity of each SME.

Table 1. Profiles of the participating SMEs.

SME Staff size (software) Main activity

SE1 20 Development of customized software

SE2 15 Development of customized software and packaged software

SE3 17 Development of customized software and design of web pages

Once the characteristics of the three companies and the case study were defined, assessment questionnaires

were applied to obtain an initial baseline through the SysProVal tool (Garcia et al., 2011). Thus, an assessment

team composed by the researchers (authors of this paper) and a project manager for each SME was created.

Additionally, two more project managers of each company (a total of six project managers) were selected in

order to assess the project management processes described in Section 2. These project managers are

professionals who know the culture of their companies and the way the development projects are performed.

These questionnaires are usually based on the activities of a reference model. Similarly, the application of

questionnaires enabled researchers, for example, to identify persons with knowledge of software estimation and

creation of plans (particularly in SE1) and these were invited to participate when defining the new process.

These obtained results allowed researchers to determine what activities were covered by the development team

and what activities had been extended to the entire organization as an institutionalized process. For example, in

an initial assessment a 42.0% of coverage was obtained for PP. The results obtained for PP depicted a 42.0% of

average coverage and 30.5% for PMC. At the end of the assessment, the obtained information was collated with

documentation of each company and through mapping interviews as part of the objective evidence.

Conclusively, the obtained results showed that the assessed processes were poorly implemented. Based on these

results and considering that it is not advisable to include more than three areas in a process improvement

initiative, the improvement effort was focused in PP and PMC since they obtained the highest scores. Three

months after completing the pilot projects, researchers continued advising SMEs in the use of the processes

defined in the experiment and they performed a second assessment in each company. The results shown in Table

2 show that all companies increased the coverage level for PP and PMC processes in 11.0% compared to the

values obtained at the first evaluation. For example, SE1 presented an initial coverage of 54.4% in the PP

process before FQPMSE implementation. A new assessment after using the framework and adopting the PALSS

showed an increase of 9.0% (in the first iteration) in the coverage. The bias was controlled by using reviews on

documentation and interviews with top management and technical groups. Additionally, related to the use of the

PALSS as a support tool for the FQPMSE implementation, Table 3 summarizes the number of employees, the

total improvement effort (hours) and effort per person for each SME. The last column of Table 3 points out the

improvement average by each company. Analyzing this table, it is interesting to observe the relationship between

the individual effort and the improvement obtained when the PALSS was used. For example, SE3 invested more

hours per person using the PALSS and achieved the highest increase in process improvement. The average

number of employees in SMEs was 17 and the average effort by each one was 24.40 hours over five months.

Table 2. Comparisons on results obtained from reassess the coverage level for PP and PMC in the SMEs.

Company Coverage

Process Before FQPMSE After FQPMSE % Increase

SE1 PP 54.0% 58.9% 9.0%

PMC 38.0% 42.2% 11.0%

SE2 PP 30.0% 33.3% 11.0%

PMC 20.0% 22.2% 11.1%

SE3 PP 41.0% 46.0% 12.2%

PMC 33.0% 37.0% 12.1%

Table 3. Improvement data for the SMEs.

Company Staff size Total effort

(hours)

Individual effort

(hours using PALSS)

Improvement

average

SE1 20 221 8.76 0.100

SE2 15 400 25.18 0.111

SE3 17 600 35.40 0.120

Total 17 407 24.40 0.110

5 Conclusions

SMEs are the organizations that are increasing the use of CMMI in number year by year and representing a

real opportunity to promote the economy of any country. In this sense, a current phenomenon present in SMEs is

that they lack training and experience in the establishment of plans and actions to define and implement

appropriate processes according to models that reflect the practices implemented in large companies. This

situation is exacerbated when the current literature has determined that most of the problems in these

organizations may be related to the lack of capacity to manage projects. It is true that many previous researches

have repeatedly established a relationship between the use of formal practices for project management and the

project performance. Project planning, for example, has been consistently associated with favorable outcomes of

the project in terms of schedule and budget. The need for effective plans and procedures as well as setting goals

and milestones has also been described as critical for project success. However, the reality is that unfortunately

these researches have not paid interest to focus the use of formal practices on the characteristics of SMEs. In this

work, an approach that focuses on project management processes such as CMMI-DEV v1.2 has been integrated

into a process which sets out to guide the process improvement in small companies. The result has been the

Framework for achieving quantitative project management (FQPMSE), which defines in detail the elements

needed to guide the activities of formulating and executing project plans in SMEs. The proposed framework is

composed of assets for Project Planning (PP), Project Monitoring and Control (PMC). These assets will enable

us to implement the necessary activities or tasks to accomplish the major objectives of the corresponding

process. The software engineering environment of FQPMSE (composed by PROMEP and PALSS) enable SMEs

to increase the facility to institutionalize effective practices for project management. It is very important to note

that, through the case study, we observed that these tools introduce and institutionalize effective practices for

managing projects in SMEs in an affordable way.

Acknowledgment

This work is sponsored by everis Consulting Foundation Company through the ‘Research Chair in Software

Process Improvement for Spain and the Latin America Region’.

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