ABSTRACT
Most government-contracting companies need to respond to a government proposal with that initial planning story. Many commercial companies need to respond to competitive challenges quickly, and this drives their initial plan. The biggest problem that software project managers may have at execution time is that the proposal-time planning may be way off the mark for budget, time, and resources. Commercial companies need to do external project planning properly to be profitable and stay in business. The unfortunate thing that happens is that any cost account manager is stuck with proposal-time planning packages. The software project manager’s big “plan” is really the software project schedule. Historically, many software project managers took the planning schedule, made up of lots of planning packages, and decomposed these planning packages into work packages or schedule tasking as visibility dictated. Tracking involves initiating work elements or tasks in a structured way to create work products that signify “done” for any task.
