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

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

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

Chapter 4: Scheduling the Project Expect to refine the plan as you schedule – and reschedule Product purpose History Release criteria Goals Project organization Schedule overview Project staffing (staffing curve) Proposed schedule Risk list Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Be Pragmatic – practical, real! “If you’re working with a customer who wants to see a project schedule before they will sign a contract, be clear that the initial schedule is your best first guess.” “Why take time to schedule in detail when you know you’ll be wrong.” She did not say… why schedule if you know you will be wrong! Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Scheduling & Estimating Not the same! Scheduling Ordering and showing interdependencies of tasks Estimating: Guessing how many effort-hours a particular task will take. Why it is so hard… why I don’t like to do it! “We generally need to estimate things we have never done before.” Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Up-front planning / scheduling Timebox the Charter One hour Timebox the Project Plan One hour Timebox the first draft of the schedule One hour Focus on what you need to get started. Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Top-Down Scheduling Start with milestones. “Deliverable-based planning” Organize project schedule into phases, iterations, or chunks. Identify tasks needed to achieve the milestone. How small are the tasks? The task is complete when the “deliverable” is delivered. Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Bottom-up & Inside-out Scheduling “If you’re using an incremental life cycle, it might make sense to start with bottom-up scheduling.” How would this work?? Inside-out You know some stuff, but not how it all fits together. Mind-maps Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Mind-maps Some generic hints to create a good mind map are: Position the main idea in the center. Preferably a picture of it. Use lots of space, so you can add things later. Use colors and capitals where useful. Personalize the map. Look for relationships. Create sub centers for sub themes. How to – Mind-maps Tony Buzan - The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential. 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

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

Hudson Bay Start Pilot your process. “Push something through the project’s environment.” Start with something that doesn’t take too much time. Implement it! – use a short timeboxed iteration. Debrief … what was learned. Should use experience to estimate tasks. Team has gained confidence – accomplishing it. The “parking lot” … use it! Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Project Management Software Using a tool… “I’ll talk to you later.” Opinion: Useless Cuts out discussion, doesn’t reveal “silent” dependencies and risks… does not generate buy-in. “…starting with a tool says to the team, “I’m in charge of the schedule; you’re not.” Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Yellow stickies 3 x 5 stickies and a bold black pen. Start writing tasks One task per… Team collaborates about sequences of events, prerequisites, assumptions, questions, etc. Bonding exercise. Bonding Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

What emerges Schedule reflects first few weeks… what the team can see. Long sequences of serial tasks. Long sequences of parallel tasks. Add arrows to show dependencies. “Once the team has… the schedule, … estimate how long each task will take.” Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Sticky scheduling for features Show how each feature integrates with others. Shows dependencies… One sticky for each deliverable. One feature may have interim deliverables On the wall… indicate when each feature is to be added to the code base. Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Sticky Scheduling Benefits Not just one critical path through the tasks… change may be daily, weekly… keep it visible. Sticky schedule doesn’t show the earliest “end date”… which is not realistic. Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

Deliverable-Based Planning Milestones are based on deliverables… not an end date. Assume a phase is done when “they” say it is? You get feedback early. Slushy milestones: Freezes are never frozen… deliverable is not complete. Plan the milestone as a rollup of the tasks before it… “Late projects never make up time. They get later and later and later... ” Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman