The goal of the Software Project Tracking and Oversight Key Process Area (KPA) is to provide sufficient insight into project performance so that the project manager can detect variances between performance and the plan and take preventive or corrective action. This KPA influences all PMBOK knowledge areas and is most closely associated with the Monitoring and Controlling group of processes. As with the other KPAs Software Project Tracking and Oversight is organized into goals, commitments, abilities, activities, measurements, and verifications. Goals The goals of this KPA relate to and support project oversight and corrective actions. The goals are that results are tracked against project plans, that corrective actions are taken when there is a variance between planned results and actual results, and that corrective actions that change the project plan are agreed to by the affected groups. The abilities and activities all support the achievement of these goals. Commitment to Perform Commitments to this KPA are required at the executive level. The first commitment is that a software project manager be assigned to the project. This commitment will be made by default for most IT projects. The project manager responsible for the entire project is likely to be someone who is considered a "software project manager", or at least has experience managing software projects. When larger projects require a sub-project for the creation of a software system or application to be defined, this commitment requires a project manager to be assigned to manage the sub-project. This is an organizational commitment, but might require you to identify and assign a project manager to manage the software sub-project if you are the overall project manager. The second commitment is also at the organizational level and it is that project management follows a written organizational policy for managing software projects. PMs working out of a PMO or PMC should have such a policy to follow. If you are a project manager leading the charge for CMM/CMMI certification you should undertake the writing of this policy to govern your project and future projects for your organization. Ability to Perform There are 5 abilities required to meet CMM/CMMI level 2 criteria. The first ability is that software project has a project plan. The second is that the software project manager assigns work to the project team. This means not only that the project manager defines, organizes, and schedules the work in their plan, but that they direct individual team members to do the work. I believe that meeting the criteria for this ability requires the software project manager to be given the authority to direct the project resources work for the duration of the project. The best way for this authority to be officially granted is through the Project Charter which governs the project. The third ability calls for adequate resources to be provided for tracking and oversight activities. Planning of the activities will be supported by the project's plans and schedule. Adequate funding will be demonstrated by the budget for resources to perform oversight and tracking activities being part of the approved project budget. Ability 4 requires the software project manager to be trained in managing the "technical and personnel aspects" of the software project. I would argue that there is no better way of demonstrating this ability than by the certification of the software project manager as a Project Management Professional (PMP®). The Project Management Institute oversee this certification and are recognized globally as the leaders in the area of project management certification and project management best practices. Certification of your software project manager is straight forward, providing PMI's criteria for project management experience are met. Providing they are, the project manager can choose from a host of quality PMP® courses or PMP® exam preparation training products to prepare them for the certification exam. These courses will train project managers in Project Management best practices and their implementation, as well as helping the project manager pass their exam. The final ability calls for first-line software managers to receive "orientation in the technical aspects of the software project". CMMI defines a first-line software manager as someone who has direct management responsibility, including responsibility for providing technical direction, for staffing and activities of a single organizational unit. This definition matches the PMBOK®'s definition of a functional manager. The first-line manager should be educated in the tools, processes, procedures, and standards used for the project. Activities Activities called for by CMM include: Use the project plan for tracking activities and communicating project status. The plan should be updated with information for work completed and made available to project stakeholders. Your MS Project file will satisfy this criterion and will convert your WBS/schedule to several formats that can be accessed by stakeholders who do not have MS Project on their desktop. The project plans are revised according to a monitoring security . This procedure will be your Change Management plan, or Integrated Change Control System (ICCS). The various components of the project plan specify how changes approved by the ICCS/Change Management plan are to be implemented. The activity also calls for a review of the revised project plan. Commitments made to external groups, and any changes to those commitments, are reviewed with senior management according to a documented procedure. In the context of tracking and oversight this activity will be described in the project's Change Management plan. Approved changes to the software project are communicated to the members of the software engineering group and other software-related groups. Your Change Management plan, or Communications Management plan, should describe this. The sizes of work products, or changes to the work products are tracked and corrective actions taken as necessary. CMM uses the word "size" to refer to the number of lines of code, .html pages, or pages of documentation produced. The idea is to compare the actual size with the estimates for the purpose of identifying actions required to correct the estimation procedure and future estimates. Effort and costs are tracked and corrective actions taken when necessary. The cost management portion of the project plan will govern monitoring and controlling expenditures and identify how corrective actions are to be identified. The Change Management plan governs how changes to the cost estimates are to be made. Since software development projects frequently aren't governed directly by budgets, this may be accomplished in the Time Management plan for the project. Critical computer resources are tracked and corrective actions taken when necessary. These will be tracked, along with other project resources, in the resource management plan. The schedule is tracked and corrective actions taken when necessary. The Time Management portion of the project plan will describe how this happens, including the analysis of late and early delivery dates on the plan. Technical activities are tracked and corrective action taken when necessary. Technical activities refer to the methods, procedures, and processes used to develop and test the software. Testing activities will be described in the Quality Management plan. Most of the methods, procedures, and processes associated with development of the software should be captured in the Configuration Management plan. Activities not covered by the Configuration Management or Quality Management plans should be described in a separate plan. Project risks are tracked. This is accomplished by the Risk Management plan Measurement data and re-planning data are recorded. This includes estimates and data associated with the estimates, plus data measuring completed work. Estimates will be captured in the WBS and schedule. Estimating tools and methods such as Function Point Analysis (FPA) will be described elsewhere. The software engineering group conducts periodic internal reviews to track technical progress, plans, performance, and issues against the plan. The software engineering group includes the first-line managers and software project manager. This activity is covered by your weekly status review meetings. Formal reviews to address accomplishments and results are conducted at selected project milestones. These formal reviews will correspond to your Gate Reviews.

Using Traditional Chinese Medicine acupuncture as a supplementary natural therapy alongside in vitro fertilization techniques (IVF) has become a substantial business in certain parts of the world. The London underground, for example, recently featured advertisements for a prestigious acupuncture clinic specializing in just that - and lets juts say it won't be cheap to buy that advertising space these days. This article explains some of the issues involved in testing acupuncture with real patients,. It also presents some of the positive results from scientific studies that may have sparked interest in the practice, some of the inconclusive results and why the studies findings might be like that. This should help explain both some of the controversy and scientific basis for the practice in today's' society. Anyone interested in the topic might be happy to discover there have been some studies conducted recently into whether acupuncture has had any success in improving treatment outcomes from IVF cycles. Within the West, the standard accepted within medical research is a significant statistic generated from a randomized controlled trial. This study design uses a group or groups of participants who try the intervention studies and another group who do not try it, the control group. In the case of studying a new technique, drug or other medical aid, it is routine for the control group to be receiving the standard therapy of the time, to see how it compares to the results of the 'novel intervention', the new idea. The participants should be allocated into the groups through a random selection process. The highest standards of evidence is felt to come from those trials where the study is of a double-blind design. That means the researchers, anyone else assisting the study and the participants are not aware of the allocation of the groups. The blinding practice is felt to eliminate potential bias. When applying the randomized controlled trial approach to acupuncture, the inherent structure can be problematic. Traditional Chinese Medicine acupuncture does not use standardized interventions. That is to say, while a standard does of a pharmaceutical drug can be tested for many patients with the same diagnosis, it would be extremely rare to find a group of patients whose symptoms and signs were so identical they would all be given exactly the same points at the same time over the same time period. The condition of each patient is an expression of the dynamic changing nature of the body's most fundamental substance, Qi, and therefore naturally over the course of some appointments, even patients with similar starting signs and symptoms would tend to progress through the use of different points over time. This difficulty aside, any clinical trials of acupuncture do not include the TCM diagnosis within their structure. Patients may be recruited into the trial according to a conventional medical diagnosis and then treated using s strangely 'standardized' set of acupuncture points, regardless of what their diagnosis might be within the medical theory of TCM. These teething problems aside, there have nonetheless been some encouraging studies investigating the effects of needling some common acupuncture points before, during and after embryo transfer. This stage is of course crucial to the success of IVF cycles, so dependent on implantation. The rationale appears to be clear, to see whether using the acupuncture at certain points which were felt to benefit general functions within TCM gynaecology theory could improve the outcomes of IVF patients by comparing it to the control group, who had no such adjunctive therapy. Some studies tried to use fake acupuncture needles as a placebo device for the control group, or needle points which they thought would have no effect on the reproductive organs. The Positive Outcome Studies 3 studies stand out as having found a positive benefit. Their methodology was similar and comparable, needling Traditional Chinese Medicine massage before and/or on the day of embryo transfer during IVF cycles (1, 2, and 3). The results showed enhanced numbers of pregnancies in their study groups receiving acupuncture alongside IVF. All of the research authors suggested this was due to an improved blood flow in the uterine arteries, and referred to a previous study of uterine artery flow during acupuncture courses as evidence (4). This was felt to be the important mechanism at work as a good arterial supply to the uterus is associated with more favorable conditions for embryo implantation within the uterus. There are also systemic reviews which also indicate favorable outcomes. Systematic reviews take a number of individual clinical trials which all should ideally use similar methods to apply the same type of intervention and compare it with control groups in each study who do not receive the intervention. The goal of the review is to identify any trends across the studies' results. Two systematic reviews also indicated higher live birth rates among patients trying acupuncture and IVF together (5, 6); however, its also true not all studies and reviews have been so positive about using acupuncture as an adjunct for IVF patients. One No Positive Outcome Study And Some Negative Appraisal of Mechanisms At Play Another individual clinical trial used similar methods to those three mentioned earlier - but found quite different results (7). The authors of that fourth study were not able to confidently conclude that the acupuncture and IVF group fared any better in terms of pregnancy rates than their IVF only control group of patients. One of the systematic reviews I have already mentioned here also indicated it was of the opinion that any positive action of acupuncture was due to the placebo effect. This would mean a psychological effect was altering the results for the participants in the intervention (acupuncture) group, rather than any direct effect on biological processes due to the needling (6). What Does This All Mean? The results from the studies are somewhat confusing, to say the least. The authors of the study which found no beneficial effect did suggest that they simply hadn't conducted the tests on a powerful enough scale to have a positive effect show up in the statistics (7). There has also long been heated debate in both the TCM and scientific community as to why acupuncture has effects and whether they are indeed, just down to patients imaginations, or whether it does something on a biological level. The body of evidence leaning towards the biological effects argument is strong, yet the review did choose to overlook this (6). TCM practitioners may point out that much of TCM is routine in China, its birthplace, where individual case reports are the norm rather than the comparative studies favored in the West. Detractors point out that a minority of conventional medics in China have spoken out against TCM as it is not fully understood by conventional science and therefore claim that it is unscientific. Nonetheless there is some compelling evidence to support the use of TCM alongside conventional medicine - if patients get better outcomes, that can only be a good thing.