Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project

Management. Johanna Rothman

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Dilbert Scott Adams

Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project

Management. Johanna Rothman

2

Dilbert Scott Adams

Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project

Management. Johanna Rothman

3

Dilbert Scott Adams

Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project

Management. Johanna Rothman

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Chapter 4: Scheduling the Project Expect to refine the plan as you schedule – and reschedule

The Plan:

• 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

5

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

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

Bottom-up & Inside-out Scheduling

• Bottom-up

“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

10

Mind-maps

Some generic hints to create a good mind map are:

1. Position the main idea in the center. Preferably a picture of it.

2. Use lots of space, so you can add things later.

3. Use colors and capitals where useful. Personalize the map.

4. Look for relationships.

5. Create sub centers for sub themes.

Tony Buzan - The Mind Map

Book: How to Use Radiant

Thinking to Maximize Your

Brain's Untapped Potential.

How to – Mind-maps

CSc 233 Fall 2009

Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project

Management. Johanna Rothman

11

Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project

Management. Johanna Rothman

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Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project

Management. Johanna Rothman

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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

14

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

15

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

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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

17

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

18

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

19

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... ”