SOA project management

SOA projects have many features in common with traditional projects.  Their brief must describe processes to manage the team, communicate between the project team, the Sponsor, Managers and Stakeholders, create strategies for the identification, control and avoidance of risk, compliance with standards, procedures and requirements and the management of time and costs to complete a project on time and within budget.   As with other IT projects SOA projects must accommodate the objectives and constraints of the project requirements and budget.

There are aspects of SOA that affect the project life-cycle.  SOA projects require service-delivery and this conditions how common delivery life-cycles are handled.  They must include processes specifically tailored to the creation of services.  For example, the analysis stage involves service modelling for the identification of entity-centric, task-centric business services and process services.  These services, or candidate services are the starting point for the subsequent processes.  Each subsequent life-cycle stage is completed is undertaken for each service identified: analysis, design, development, testing and deployment. 

… SOA project work contains all of the phases of traditional project management but it should be adjusted to ensure that the service model is defined properly and service-oriented analysis is completed.