Effective Software Project Management

Appendix C. The Project Overview Statement

Define the problem before you pursue a solution.

—Neils Bohr

Appendix Learning Objectives

After reading this appendix, you will be able to: Describe the Project Overview Statement Know the purpose of the Project Overview Statement Understand attachments to the Project Overview Statement

Note

Most of the material in this chapter is an abridged version of material discussing the Project Overview Statement (POS) from my earlier book Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme, Third Edition (Wiley, 2003). It is presented here for completeness so that this book may be used as a text for an introductory course in software project management. For courses requiring more detail the earlier work may be used as a companion text.

There needs to be a high-level description of every project. This will be a document that should get broad distribution across the enterprise. I call that document the Project Overview Statement. It is a one-page non-technical description of the Opportunity/Problem, Goal, Objectives, Success Criteria, Risks and Assumptions of the project.

The Requirements Document provides the input you need to generate the Project Overview Statement (POS). The POS is a short document (ideally one page) that concisely states what is to be done in the project, why it is to be done, and what business value it will provide to the enterprise when completed.

The main purpose of the POS is to secure senior management approval ...