Scott Adams DILBERT Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Scott Adams DILBERT Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Scott Adams DILBERT Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Program Management “Coordinating several subprojects or a series of projects to meet specific business objectives” Program Manager ensures projects are meeting objectives: If objectives change… Program Manager decides how projects should change Project Manager then decides how to implement the change Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Program Plan Template Overview Features Program Requirements Program Goals Market evaluation & Marketing plan Sales plan ROI and product lifetime Schedule overview Staffing curve Training plan Service / support plan Other plans Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Return On Investment There are four commonly used formulas to determine ROI. Formula 1: ROI: Costs = X; Benefits = Y Gives Management information and lets them make an intelligent comparison; the math obscures the magnitude and importance of the numbers in the ROI calculation Formula 2: Formula 3: Formula 4: Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

The Math Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Net Present Value (NPV) of Benefits - Costs NPV compares the value of a dollar today to the value of that same dollar in the future, taking inflation into account. If the NPV of a prospective project is positive, it should be accepted. However, if NPV is negative, the project should probably be rejected because cash flows will also be negative. Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Manage It. Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Excel

Apps available in Excel Future Value Net Present Value Present Value

Organizing Multiple Related Projects How to track which requirements are in which release? Release Trains Technique of planning software releases on regular or cyclic time period, for example, the last day of every quarter, or every 9 weeks, etc. The "train" metaphor is based on the concept of railroad train schedules (planned arrival and departure times) and that trains carry multiple types of rolling stock (different types of projects are included in a release). Plan to “organize features into a quarterly timebox” … to facilitate scheduling of periodic multiple releases of the product. Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Release Train Open Source commercial products: Clearspace and Jive Forums Adopted a release train model for their projects. Why the change? … to "move as fast as possible with high quality". For end users of their products, the key thing to know was that there would be a new release every three weeks. Each version contains bug fixes and new features and we're committed to maintaining high quality for every release (no more rushed bug fixes a week after a release). Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Making Release Trains Work… Program Manager manages the product release criteria… managing the Trains. Project Managers manage their project… their “part”. Only what is needed … avoiding YAGNI work! "You Aren't Gonna Need It" is the principle in extreme programming that programmers should not add functionality until it is necessary. Ron Jeffries writes, "Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them." SW Configuration Management – a must! “Good” estimation needed to meet release dates. Automated regression testing… a must! Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Software Configuration Management (SCM) The task of tracking and controlling changes in the software. Configuration management practices include revision control and the establishment of baselines SCM answers the question "Somebody did something, how can one reproduce it?“ Often the problem involves not reproducing "it" identically, but with controlled, incremental changes. Answering the question thus becomes a matter of comparing different results and of analyzing their differences. Traditional SCM focused on controlled creation of relatively simple products. Now, implementers of SCM face the challenge of dealing with relatively minor increments under their own control, in the context of the complex system being developed. Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Release Trains requires Great SCM GOALS: Configuration identification - Identifying configurations, configuration items and baselines Configuration control - Implementing a controlled change process. This is usually achieved by setting up a CHANGE CONTROL BOARD whose primary function is to approve or reject all change requests that are sent against any baseline. Configuration status accounting - Recording and reporting all the necessary information on the status of the development process. Configuration auditing - Ensuring that configurations contain all their intended parts and are sound with respect to their specifying documents, including requirements, architectural specifications and user manuals. Build management - Managing the process and tools used for builds. Process management - Ensuring adherence to the organization's development process. Environment management - Managing the software and hardware that host our system. Teamwork - Facilitate team interactions related to the process. Defect tracking - Making sure every defect has traceability back to the source.

Addison-Wesley Professional Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises (The Agile Software Development Series) (Paperback) by Dean Leffingwell Addison-Wesley Professional Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Let’s do Agile Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Managing Project Managers Manage “by deliverable”. Follow “Management by Exception” (MBE). Practice whereby only the information that indicates a significant deviation of actual results from the budgeted or planned results is brought to the management's notice. Its objective is to facilitate management's focus on really important tactical and strategic tasks. In MBE, the decision that cannot be made at one level of management is passed on to the next higher level. Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Managing Project Managers Manage “by deliverable”. Follow “Management by Exception”. Review each project’s dashboard. Review each project’s risk list. Rely on feedback. Status checks… Program Gantt Chart (all Projects) Schedule of “handoffs” … all interdependencies visible! Weekly status reports (each Project) Review risks’ list with each Project Manager Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

For Agile Projects review: Velocity Charts Iteration Content Charts Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Program Dashboard Program Managers design their own… Need to represent interdependencies of resources and deliverables. The author’s “storyboard-like mechanism” to describe program’s progress… pictures on the wall ????? Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Testing… Page 280 - last paragraph “I’ve use a template… “ Page 286 - 8 lines from the bottom “Your job is too look for obstacles…” Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman