Project management testing

Project management testing phase is a vital stage of project acceptance, when it is necessary to prove compliance of project’s results with certain preset criteria. The point is to obtain all-round vision of critical areas – if project executors had met all the requirements according to given plan, or if something important was missed. Each project requires its own strategy that is driven by project’s specific measurements of success and compliance precision’s variations (dictated by industry standards and requirements of stakeholders). Actually, it may include the following subjects to be investigated and examined:

• Key deliverables and milestones – specifics of designing a project management test plan (testing roadmap) for this purpose are actually conditioned by the type of deliverance that was produced. These objects of project management test phase are examined through performance of a real sub-project that is motivated by aspiration to check if project’s products meet customers’ acceptance requirements in terms of the following:
  • If the product’ usability and features cover the whole set of predefined purposes and needs;
  • If the output meets industrial and common sense standards for quality, accuracy and appropriateness in technical realization;
  • If the product is generally correct in terms of declared expectations, and what is the precise rate of compliance.
  • What is the rate of defections, their impact and severity, ways to remedy?
• Timeline and budget – this type of tests (actual evaluating against pre-planned estimation) embrace checking if resources management results are satisfactory – if the budgets (time and costs) weren’t seriously exceeded, or if any amount or resources remain unused. Controlling time and budget requires making accurate investigations and calculations during the whole performance – through studying special documents related to allocation and reporting of resources engaged. Basically, we could say that these attempts require preparation for the sake of the following actions:

• Calculating actual costs and comparing them against estimated budgets by every piece of work and project stage;
• Calculating durations and time points with comparing them vs. estimated parameters by every piece of work and project stage;
• Calculating of the overall project costs and time to compare them against the estimated parameters;

Software in questions and answers:

• Why we need software for PM testing? – Because it can provide you with a clear picture of how resources (labour, costs and time) are allocated over the project, so that you can easily check when and how different tasks were completed.
• How does software for project management testing work? – It can work in a multiuser regime, via a client-server technology, delivering electronic real-time collaboration to all members of your project management team, so that they can share the same matters and data concurrently.

• How can we use such software? – you can use it for creating and sharing compliance acceptance checklists, testing plans, actual ongoing PM activities, calculating and checking your project resources.
• Can you give us an example of such software? – Yes, good example is VIP Task Manager that is agile enough to provide all members of your project team with all the mentioned possibilities. The secret of its flexibility is in its tasks- and time- oriented structure – you are free to plan and monitor different kinds of your project-related activities and functions within a sole database.