Applying resource capability for planning and managing contingency reserves for software and information engineering projects

In project management, an important means to reduce risks is to provide adequate quantities of contingency reserve in terms of capital (fund), person, time (person hours), in the estimate of required project resources. Experienced project managers usually provide more accurate estimate of these quantities. The traditional project management methodologies, such as System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), were developed to handle software and information engineering projects of longer duration and larger number of project members. Many projects in modern days have short duration and smaller number of project members. They tend to follow newer methodologies, such as Agile Development, to adapt to the faster changes of modern technologies and user requirements. For a project manager, gathering information to properly create an effective project plan is like identifying a collection of problems and solving them. Solving problems needs supporting resources, which is analogous to the fact that projects need adequate supporting resources. Chang [1] proposed three elements of methods of problem solving with supporting resource capabilities. This paper proposes an approach that uses these resource capabilities to estimate and manage contingency reserves of a modern-day project in software or information engineering.