As software project management involves too much complexity and workload to be handled with just manual efforts, its nature is systematically different from other conventional project management tasks.

In the field of software engineering, software project management refers to the management of activities performed in software development process,being included in the domain of software process management. Researches into software process management have been carried out from two broad perspectives around the world since 1980s.

The first perspective is about “what activities should be performed for successful software development?” and the second perspective is about “how can the activities in software development process be effectively automated and managed?”

Born from the former perspective are the software process standards: SW-CMM, CMMI, SPICE/A-SPICE, ISO9000, ISO/IEC 122207, to name a few.

The latter perspective branched into specific research areas such as software process-centered software engineering environment and software process automation, and the software project management system talked about here belongs to this category, too.

Researches and implementations have been carried out in the two domains above for the past several decades, and in particular, experts have already suggested many lessons learned and roadmaps for the automation of software project management for a little less than a couple of decades. Yet, there have been very few experts for the software process automation domain in Korea and there have been many misaligned case of S/W project management automation founded on prevailing approaches of industrial engineering/manufacturing disciplines.

Hence, many face difficulties while employing conventional project management system for software project management. Of course, simple WBS (Work Break-Down Structure) development tool can be used, but anything more than that will meet with logical limitations in terms of the characteristics of software development.Then, what are the items that need to be considered for a proper and effective project management system?

Answers to this question are as follows:
A proper and effective project management system should:

1. 01Reflect the characteristics of software project as a knowledge industry undertaking.
2. 02Minimize dependence on rapidly changing software/hardware development technologies.
3. 03Consider off-product activities.
4. 04Consider varying competency level of project members.
5. 05Need to provide best practices.
6. 06Consider the characteristics of collaboration.
7. 07Consider the characteristics of each project type.
8. 08Act as a control tower across multiple projects.
9. 09Support interface with other tools.
10. 10Continue to accumulate and analyze data metrics.