1. Project Management Tools Brian Scriber Project Management

2. Agenda: 1 hour of Tools Quick Background
Why One Tool Won’t Fill the Toolbox
Tools to Explore
Scrum (overview)
XPlanner (demo/walkthrough)
Bugzilla (demo/walkthrough)
Microsoft Project (breif)

3. Background Brian Scriber brian.scriber@ieee.org
BS Computer Engineering: University of Michigan
MS Computer Science: University of Colorado
MBA*: 2008 University of Colorado, Leeds School of Business
CSDP, SCJP, SCJD, SCEA, PMP
13 years implementing and managing projects at different levels
Chief Architect at ICAT

4. Types of Projects Which tool should I use? Software Development
Construction
Marketing
Municipal
Domestic
Multi-million dollar
Hundred dollar
Team
Individual
Which tool should I use?

5. Aspects of Projects Which tool should I use? Schedule Management
Budget/Cost Management
Scope Management
Quality Management
Customer Satisfaction
Change Management
Risk Management
Documentation
Communication
Performance Monitoring
Contracting
Which tool should I use?

6. Aspects of Projects Schedule Management Budget/Cost Management
MS Project, XPlanner, Rally, MS Excel
Budget/Cost Management
Oracle Financials, MS Excel, Quicken
Change Management
Bugzilla, Jira, IBM Rational (ClearQuest & ClearCase), CVS/Subversion, TeamTrack, MS Excel
Scope Management
MS Word, Meetings
Quality Management
TQM, Six-Sigma
Customer Satisfaction
Survey Monkey, MS Word, Telephone,
Risk Management
Crystal Ball, MS Excel

7. and Scrum Scrum -- Agile, iterative, transparent development process.
Backlog
Constantly changing, prioritized, list of project work (Bugzilla)
The Sprint
1-week planning period (LOEs, Allocations, Discussions)
3-week intensive software development
Test-first methodology
Retrospective: Sprint Review
Daily Stand-up Meetings: The “Scrum”
Pigs and Chickens
Yesterday, Today, Roadblocks, Cool
Task and Schedule Status Tool
XPlanner

8. and Scrum: Planning Week
Level Of Effort Estimates: LOEs
Change Requests (CRs) are reviewed and estimated
Sprint week: weekly estimation time
Planning week: open estimation
Maximum of 15 minutes of engineering effort per CR
Accuracy goal was originally 50% but we’re closing in on 15%
Complexity estimation tools and estimate analysis feedback loop
Allocations
20% of time is unusable
Flow and No-Flow: Peopleware (DeMarco and Lister)
10% of time is for infrastructure/architecture initiatives
Remaining time allocated to projects
Debt ~10% FTest ~8% ATest ~7% Overhead ~5%
QA Environment Support ~15%
Production Support ~5%
Change Requests: ~50%

9. Why Agile? Eng./Bus. Dissonance
Software & Engineering
The Business World
Market expectations
Changing business requirements
ROI and strong needs for business planning
“IKIWISI”
Lack complete understanding of app. complexity
High degree of novelty in software development (not an assembly line)
Creative solutions
Difficult to estimate
Elicitation of details requires change management
Lack understanding of all the business drivers

10. and Projects Iterations Story Task
Long term (multiple sprints) business or engineering efforts
Example: New External Quoting Portal
Iterations
Iteration = Sprint
3 week period of development
Each sprint is deliverable to production. Work will be complete.
Story
Story = Use Case or major feature
Task
Atomic unit of production.
At ICAT we limit task duration to 16 hours but shoot for less than 6 hours on 2s (95%) of our tasks (1 day of Flow time)

11. and Task Type Task Disposition Planned, Added, Discovered
Feature, Defect, ATest, FTest, Overhead, Debt

12. and Technical Requirements for XPlanner Open Source project
Active community involvement (SourceForge, Blog, etc.)
No licensing fees
Runs in Tomcat (open source servlet container)
Available across your intranet via web browsers
You can control access and permissions
Depends on the MySQL database (open source)
Alternative databases are possible but not really supported.
Hosting and disaster recovery
You will need a dedicated server with high availability
Up to you to back up your db
SOAP interfaces: Standard web service integration
Authentication through LDAP is in development
Setup shouldn’t take more than an hour

13. Admin Perspective

16. Engineer Interactions

22. Management, Business Sponsor and PM Interactions

31. and Bugzilla Technical Requirements for Bugzilla Open Source project
Active community involvement and updates
No licensing fees
Runs under Perl (open source software)
Available across your intranet via web browsers
You can control access and permissions
Depends on the MySQL database (open source)
Hosting and disaster recovery
You will need a dedicated server with high availability
Up to you to back up your db
Authentication through LDAP is available
Setup shouldn’t take more than half an hour

32. Bugzilla Change Request Lifecycle

36. Microsoft Project
This has become de-rigueur for project managers, but it is expensive, onerous to use, opaque, and it can get you into more trouble than it will get you out of.
Great tool to layout major dependencies
Temptation to put every activity on the plan
“Gantt Chart Hell”
Resource Leveling: NEVER do this
All of this said, you must be able to use MS Project as a project manager.