Project Management with the IBM Rational Unified Process

This book will examine the advantages achieved and challenges faced by organizations utilizing the Rational Unified Process (RUP), particularly in regards to outsourcing. As companies strive to cut costs and increase efficiencies in software development, allocating tasks to outside organizations has become more common. The relationship between an outsourcing organization and its contractor affects the success of projects and prevents the RUP from being implemented effectively. For example, the RUP stresses the importance of working directly with end users to elicit functional requirements. Yet many outsourced contracts are written which do not even consider how the contractor will interface with the end users, or whether the end users are even available. As a result, some projects are set up for failure from the beginning because of the lack of consideration of this issue. Mistakes made during this process are not discovered until late in the development cycle. By that time, the outsourcing organization receives software that is unsatisfactory, with insufficient funds left to correct the situation. Readers of this book will learn about outsourcing issues they will face before they occur, through lessons learned applying RUP on actual projects. This will allow them to better manage problems and will give them an improved ability to satisfy the needs of their customers, whether they are an outsourcing organization or a contractor.