chapter 1: starting a project
TRANSCRIPT
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project
Management. Johanna Rothman
1
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
4
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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... ”