Objective
Gruppo PRO's core business is information systems automation in medium and large industrial companies. We customise and install products developed by ourselves and we provide assistance to the start up of the automated systems. Our process suffers from the low accuracy of the initial estimate of the customisation task. Due to the incompleteness of the initial requirements and to unmanaged changes a considerable percentage of unanticipated work creeps in during the very last project stages. Our goal is to increase the reliability of our cost and schedule estimates and to reduce the percentage of unanticipated work by improving our requirements management capabilities, including control over the requirements changes.
THE EXPERIMENT
The main actions in ESTREMA will focus on the following tasks:
experimenting a methodical approach to the identification and representation of the user requirements. This method will involve the delivery of a feasibility study document serving as a basis for the initial cost and schedule estimate
defining and experimenting a change control procedure to manage requirements modifications and their impact on the initial estimates
experimenting with a project performance assessment practice to establish requirements fulfilment and estimation accuracy; to this aim the collection of project performance data should allow the creation of a historical baseline to be used for improving successive estimates.
In ESTREMA the experimentation will be carried out on a baseline project which consists of the adaptation and installation of our management information systems package PROJ in two companies belonging to sectors which are strategic for our business, and where the requirements are so different that our requirements and estimation process could be affected.
EXPECTED IMPACT AND EXPERIENCE
We expect that we will achieve a smaller deviation from the costs and schedule anticipated initially. Also, a higher estimation accuracy should allow a better planning of our resources and avoid that delays in one project preclude the release of precious resources. Finally, thanks to the definition of company standards and procedures more people will be in a position to estimate projects reliably, whereas this responsibility is nowadays vested on few people with great experience.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measuresCoordinator
40056 Bologna
Italy