(Scrum, Project management and MS Project) tooling

Tips regarding using scrum w MS Project

2011-04-16T09:09:00.004+02:00

Scrum is only a tool and you must make sure to double check your processes before ploting the backlogs in the scrum board. Unprepared Project Managing makes your plan fail.

I have seen PMs creates their own rules. Some I've seen was:

DoneDone, When I asked what they meant by this the Scrummaster replied:

When the programmer declares that a backlog is finnished, when it has been approved by the product-owner. And in the real life no product. manager/owner/Customer knows exactly, whant she/he wants before the feature is released and then they find out something is missing.

This is part of your planning. and if the Product-manager (customer) did not do his job properly or if you are sure that he is not able to come up with the whole feature discription, You must have it in your paln. Here is a tip how you can handle this scenario.

Suppose your project plan has a 10 sprint, sprint 1 to sprint 10 and experince has shown you that your customers (product-owner) always come up with the last change in the last min.

So in this case you must create your ms project as following:

Sprint 1 and here is the work is 300 hours.
Add a Sprint 1 Follow up that has between 10% to 20% of the total Sprint 1 work.
and add another 20% for test and bug fix.

so here is the result:

Sprint 1 : 300h
Sprint 1 Follow up: 30h (10%)
Sprint 1 Error Fix: 60h (20% of 330 hours)
Total of the S1 : 390h

I hope this will help you to approve your projects.
Please add your questions and comments to the blog or
send and email to bobby.saeidi@adept.dk

Regards
Bobby Saeidi

scrum with ms project part 2

2010-10-11T09:57:00.008+02:00

After 2 years of working hard on this idea, me and my team came up with a scrum server that talks with ms project.
Coming up wit the correct process was a huge challange, but now it is there working

We have been testing it and it begins to work perfectly.

We have also made a video in 3 min that shows how it works.
Please watch.

Please send your comment to bobby.saeidi@adept.dk

Use Scrum with MS Project

2009-11-18T09:39:00.008+01:00

A Software Project manager faces many challenges. One of the challenges is, How to use the tools.

They spend 1000 of dollars of learning MS Project or other tooling and at the end so many of them ending with using MS Excel and still project gets delayed and ending up to pay penalties to the customer or Ends up with HUGE over cost.

This is not only good for your pocket but most important it is not good for your company Image.

And if you are the project manager you have to answer the CEO.

How about MS Project ? Well, Ms Project is still a tool.

Use it correctly. Dont overload it with small un important activities.

Limit number of activities and it gives you more overview to your project.

Dont try to detail plan in your ms project but to use headlines and estimates.

My advice to you is to define your process carefully before starting your project.

“SCRUM and agile Project management is good”
The “Vibe” around Scrum is huge nowadays. Is it only a “Vibe” or is Scrum come to stay?

Scrum is good because

1) It gives overview, because a big project is cut down to small projects (sprints) of 3-30 days.

2) You involve the team to estimate (They know what is going on)

3) Daily Standup instead of weekly meetings.

4) Burndown chart to give the project status. After all the ETC (estimate to Complete) tells you, when your project will be finnished

Burnup (Spent hours) is not much mentioned in the Scrum, but is very important. becuase it tells you, howmuch your project had cost you so far (maybe you are already overbudgeted and you are only half way there ?).

If the ETC on day 1 is 100h and after a 5 days is 80h

and the employee has been present the whole week ?.
The answer is either:

1) He has been doing some other tasks.

2) Or the ETC was not done correctly

3) Or have I forgot “Dependencies” ?

Combine "MS Project with Scrum to gain more control".

Many PM uses MS Project as a listing tool. They just list all the activities and at the end the PM ends up having a long list with 400 lines of activities with many sub activities.
Learn scrum it is easy.
Define Sprints in Ms project. Let the team decide, what are the sub activities. You as project Manager really don’t care about all those details. All you need is deliverables and correct estimate.

Preestimate each Sprint based on the budget you have in MS Project. And Let the come with actual Estimate with scrum.

They will present you an esimate
if their estimates matches your Budget then you are good
However, if the estimates are larger than your budget, then you have three choices,

1) Extend the sprint budget

2) Remove a couple of functionality in the (backlog) product list

3) Move the functionalities to another sprint and hope it can fit there.

Please share your experiences with us or tell what you think is missing in a good Project management tool.