Execute the Project and Manage Your Budget

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe how to manage processes and schedules of cybersecurity projects.
Assemble a team of people from multiple departments to work on the project.
Explain relevant technologies and architectures necessary to support your project.

Manage Processes and Schedules

Hassan is a technical project manager at an educational charity dedicated to women’s empowerment. He’s creating an online tool that will serve as a platform for an outreach program for girls in schools. He knows that for this project to be successful, he needs to implement a solid project management practice that takes into account both client needs and security considerations. After project planning is complete, he puts the plans into motion. He balances the needs of diverse stakeholders, deals with inevitable project changes, and negotiates delicate compromises. He manages tasks, collaborates, and reports on project progress. These steps are key to sticking to his budget and deadline, while keeping the most important tasks at the forefront.

Projects have all types of activities going on, and you, as the technical project manager, need to keep the whole thing moving with a plan to direct, manage, monitor, and control project change. Just like an airplane with many parts, projects are an interconnected network of stakeholders and activities attempting to accomplish a goal. As the pilot of the airplane, you coordinate with the air traffic controller, flight attendants, your co-pilot, and the passengers to ensure the flight goes smoothly and everyone arrives safely and on time at their desired destination.

A pilot is flying the plane with a co-pilot, coordinating with flight attendants and in communication with air traffic control.

Let’s take a closer look at how Hassan manages the project's scope, schedule, budget, quality, and human resources to successfully deliver the desired functionality in a secure manner.

Managing Scope and Schedule

An important aspect of project management is managing scope. Hassan breaks down the scope of the project into workstreams and maintains control to ensure the scope doesn’t vary. He also manages the time and schedule associated with the scope to define what tasks need to be completed and in what order, how much time and resources are devoted to each step, and what adjustments may be necessary to finish the project on time.

Establishing the Critical Path

To ensure the project is on track, Hassan focuses on the critical path. The critical path is made up of the most important activities in a project that must be completed in the shortest time, in a logical order to achieve a minimally viable product (MVP). The purpose of the critical path is to help him focus on managing the activities that are most important to the project’s success in order to finish the project on schedule.

The team that Hassan works on uses an agile development process. His job is to manage sprints (or short bursts of work to deliver specific functionality), while also providing strategic direction to the team. Hassan leads a short daily standup meeting in the mornings in which each of the people on the development team share what they did the previous day, what they plan to accomplish that day, and anything that may prevent them from achieving what they plan. He uses these meetings to keep track of the project and to provide status updates to his stakeholders.

Managing the Budget

As the project progresses, Hassan needs to make sure it does not run over the budget by reassigning resources as needed, adjusting the scope, and if necessary identifying sources of new funding. For example, if the client asks to add new functionality half way through the project, Hassan needs to assess the cost and communicate the tradeoffs to the client so they can make a decision about how to allocate or augment resources.

Managing Quality

Hassan also ensures that the project’s deliverables meet performance standards, and plans for quality assurance and control processes in the project timeline, including security processes. For example, the client may have a requirement for all of their technologies to be protected by multifactor authentication. Hassan needs to keep this in mind when designing the identity and access management features of the project, and ensure login to the system can support this in a secure manner. He advises the client on options for implementation and which vendors can best provide this functionality at a reasonable cost.

Using Project Management Software

To help manage the team and improve coordination, Hassan uses a variety of project management software tools. For example, he uses Kanban, a tool used in agile software development that visualizes customer requirements as cards moving from left to right across a board. He groups tasks into categories which include, in queue, in progress, and recently completed. Using Kanban helps him easily estimate and prioritize upcoming tasks. It also enables him to assign new tasks as inspired by customer demand, and assess the team’s current workload with estimated burden on the team’s productivity.

Hassan also uses a Gantt chart to help manage activities over time. On the left of the chart, he lists the activities associated with the project, and on the top, he lists a time scale. Each activity is represented by a bar, and the position and length of the bar reflects the start date, duration, and end date of the activity. It allows him at a glance to see the status of each activity of the project.

Work Across Departments

Hassan knows that successful project execution requires frequent, open communication with the project team members and stakeholders. It’s his job to integrate people and data across the organization by:

Communicating with stakeholders in both technical and nontechnical terms.
Planning for communications with stakeholders early on in the project and throughout the project lifecycle.
Scheduling regular meetings/conference calls.
Highlighting use cases in communications so users understand new features.
Providing summary reports to decision makers and executive stakeholders.
Facilitating informal and fun activities such as virtual happy hours.

In working across departments, Hassan leverages a number of tools, such as Kanban and Gantt charts, as well as a ticketing system, chat platform, and document collaboration tool to keep stakeholders and resources in the loop. Using project management tools can help bring the organization’s workflow under control and coordinate all the moving parts. Hassan knows that successful coordination and communication across teams is key to the overall project success, but is also a critical part of reducing software errors or other security risks that can happen when there is a lack of clear communication.

Apply Knowledge of Technologies and Architectures

As a project manager there are certain technologies and architectures Hassan needs to be familiar with to be successful. Let’s take a closer look at a few.

Technology/Architecture	Purpose
Hardware and software installation	Hassan needs to know how to deploy and customize hardware and software installations for his customer base. He schedules the deployment, installs the hardware or software to local and remote offices, and supports customers in its use.
Upgrades	To improve the quality of the technology supporting a project, Hasan may need to make the case for upgrading the tech and acquires pending approval. Part of this process will be to show how improving technology can reduce downtime and increase productivity.
Site maintenance	Hassan needs to plan for how the website associated with the project will be updated and managed after deployment. He needs to plan for staying on top of issues and mistakes to keep the content accurate, relevant, and secure.
Program development	A project may be made up of one application or system, or an entire technology ecosystem that must be managed as one. In developing a project that is part of an overall technology program, Hassan has to manage customers, requirements, rollout, and time-to-market pressures. He identifies key issues up front, builds flexibility into the project, and makes sure he understands risks.
Application development	Hassan manages a team of developers responsible for coding, testing, deploying, and transitioning the application associated with the project to operations and maintenance. He works with the team to design and develop the application, make sure it is secure, and prioritize new functionality to meet business requirements.

Knowledge Check

Ready to review what you’ve learned? The knowledge check isn’t scored—it’s just an easy way to quiz yourself. To get started, drag the description in the left column below the matching term on the right. When you finish matching all the items, click Submit to check your work. To start over, click Reset.

Great job! In the next unit, we'll learn how to monitor the progress of a project. Let's go!