Questions tagged [planning]
This tag is for questions that involve planning a project schedule or planning tasks for the team.
330
questions
-3
votes
1answer
30 views
Project plans do not turn out to be perfect. No matter how much planning, preparing and strategizing you have invested in a project, change may happen
Discuss the relation of project planning with project success. Support your answer with at least TWO (2) facts.
0
votes
1answer
20 views
Scheduling/Gantt tool with specific features
I'm wondering if there is a free tool that allows me to enter tasks and for each task define:
Work time
Lead time
Assigned person
Dependencies
and then have the tool generate a gantt chart based on ...
0
votes
0answers
18 views
Project management for a new startup [closed]
It's the first time when I'm working as an IT Manager/ Project Manager (I'm CO-Founder too). Basically we are a board from different segments and we want to start a system selling subscriptions (SaaS)....
1
vote
1answer
52 views
Priority coefficient for sprint planning
Some time ago I read about an entity called "priority coefficient" (my rough translation to English) which could be calculated via
where IIRC:
V is an item's business value estimated by PO
S is an ...
1
vote
1answer
24 views
Managing Large Teams in MS Project
I am using MS Project 2016. I have been looking at a way to assign tasks to teams rather than to individuals.
This is because I am managing large teams, the compositions of which keep changing, ...
0
votes
2answers
90 views
Sprint planning
I am a new PM/PO in a software firm in California. I am working with offshore team in India. As a new PM/PO I need to do Sprint Planning. As I understand, Sprint Planning is also known as Sprint 0 as ...
1
vote
4answers
144 views
What to do for delayed stories between sprints
I want to ask about stories that are not considered done because of missing information from the customer.
I have a sprint with 60 user stories and at the end of the last 2 sprints, I can say that ...
5
votes
3answers
467 views
How do you organize/plan your discovery session so that it does not conflict with the work of the current sprint?
Let's suppose you have a team of 10 developers working on automation (RPA). They are working in 4 different, independent bots.
The PO comes with more opportunities for automation. These opportunities ...
6
votes
6answers
448 views
Should all required user story assets be available before sizing a story or starting the sprint?
I am a developer. Sometimes we have stories which will require some sort of asset that is not in the control of the dev team. A common example would be that the story calls for a new piece of UI to be ...
1
vote
0answers
11 views
Auto Scheduling in Microsoft Project Planning 2016 is not working as expected
I scheduled many tasks in the AUTO schedule, However, it is not taking/changing the dates once I link all the tasks. Due to that, I selected the start date manually which is resulting in a different ...
0
votes
2answers
72 views
How to estimate and plan with a distributed, part-time team?
The situation: We are a small, fully-distributed software solutions provider. We serve multiple clients, and given our size that means every team member is on multiple, part-time billable teams. ...
0
votes
3answers
85 views
Unfinished works in Sprint
What we can do, if we identified in a middle of a sprint that we cannot complete the agreed user stories and Product owner/Business user is resisting to accept the spills / unfinished works? Team ...
2
votes
1answer
47 views
What does the “Purpose” section of a Software Project Plan describe?
I am developing a Software Project Plan and I am referencing a template that seems to define the Purpose section as describing the purpose of the project plan, and not the purpose of the product for ...
0
votes
1answer
40 views
How to make a project use actual months
I am trying to create a project where the duration is calculated in Months. Eg. The project starts on M1 (month January), shall finish on M24 (month December next year).
Scenario 1: I'm adding a new ...
0
votes
0answers
23 views
Catchup plan and look ahead schedule in MS Project
How to create a catch-up plan,30 days look ahead schedule and s-curves in MS-Project 2016?
1
vote
2answers
38 views
How to create a production schedule in a job shop setting?
A typical Master Production Schedule (MPS) should have:
What you need to produce
How much you need to produce
When you need the items
However, the issue arises when in reality, the jobs in our ...
5
votes
3answers
360 views
Dev went on vacation leaving his work unfinished. How to manage this without informing the customer?
I would like to discuss and hear some advice from you about a pretty common situation.
We develop the functionality that has huge business value for the customer’s project and thus the customer is ...
3
votes
2answers
70 views
Should single user story contain estimations for each involved guild in full-stack development team
Problem
We're working in a full-stack development team composed of three guilds (backend, frontend, QA), so as a team we share a single sprint board.
User stories we take into our sprints are written ...
1
vote
1answer
57 views
SRS for project with multiple sub modules
I have to write a System Requirements Specification for an upcoming project and it is the first time that I draft such a document. In my case we are creating a smartphone App which will have a basic ...
1
vote
3answers
133 views
How far should you vertically slice?
We are a small team of 4 software developers trying to use Scrum. We have a large project to start from scratch and we've hit a roadblock regarding slicing the project.
The project is a distributed ...
2
votes
5answers
128 views
How to plan for bugs, looking for advice
I work in a software development company, where we use something which resembles scrum.
We have sprints of 4 weeks
We have 6 sprints / release
We plan a development per sprint, with an estimate
We ...
2
votes
5answers
144 views
How to handle a large and ambiguous requirement with a fixed timeline/deadline (9 months to deliver)
This was asked in an interview. I had one such experience in the past and at that time a single developer and PM initially conducted a pilot (manual + semi-automated) for a month/two to understand the ...
0
votes
1answer
98 views
Scrum task estimation methodologies
I want to know about tasks analysis and estimation methods that can be used in a Scrum process to make task estimations for a sprint.
Deciding whether a story(task) is small or large requires some ...
2
votes
2answers
66 views
How to calculate project finish date with fixed work and different date of resource availability
I am preparing a high-level project plan in mpp to see the top level view when the project will finish based on the resources availability and work estimation.
My requirement is as: I have an ...
2
votes
7answers
106 views
When to process feedback on the deliverable of the last iteration?
My team and I are working with iterations of two weeks (trying to use our own version of Scrum) and we try to deliver a new version after every iteration.
After an iteration we let the stakeholders ...
4
votes
5answers
159 views
How to work with sprints having to provide support to unplanned issues?
All, I have to work with an Agile team that they have to attend to live system issue(tickets) fixing while working on a sprint. So that we cannot achieve the committed SP at the end of the sprint. ...
2
votes
2answers
136 views
If Velocity should not be used for future estimations, what is it good for?
I have read the following thread and a few articles sharing the same view - velocity should not be used for predictions.
This has somehow rocked my world, as we often look at the velocity, remaining ...
2
votes
4answers
87 views
Avoiding vendor lock-in with few vendors available
My company is venturing into a niche area of the telecom business. The challenge we are facing is there are very few vendors of some critical software we need and in turn there are very few customers ...
1
vote
2answers
114 views
How to estimate a Research and Development project?
Our software team has been doing a lot of R&D work to improve the performance of our product. Of course, the management team would like to know how long it's going to take to improve the ...
3
votes
4answers
139 views
How to arrive at a project plan for migrating a legacy web application to ReactJS based application
I need to come-up with a project plan for migrating a legacy web application to a ReactJS based application.
The legacy web application is written in Vanilla JS, HTML, CSS and there are approximately ...
1
vote
2answers
133 views
New IT project documentation
When there is a new IT project, what documentation should we begin with? What structure do they usually have. Is there a common standard to compose them?
I am entirely new to IT projects, I am ...
2
votes
1answer
73 views
MS Project Change Working Time - Roster
How can I change the working time to 2 weeks ( working - 14 days) and 1 week (not working - 7 days)? Is this able to be automatically populated?
2
votes
4answers
225 views
We work with fixed scope, price and time - why should we use Story points?
We deliver projects in fixed price, fixed time and fixed scope environment. We have a contract that specify those, specifications of features. Recently, an agile couch was trying to convince me to ...
4
votes
6answers
228 views
What should a scrum team do if they complete work earlier than expected?
Our development team estimates that they can complete 30 story points in the current iteration. Partway through the sprint they realize that they will complete 50 story points at their current rate. ...
2
votes
2answers
98 views
Agile Release Planning
Let's say my team's velocity is 50 and for the next release, we need to complete a 500 worth of user story points. My sprint length is 2 weeks. So if I divided 500 by 50 I need to spend 10 sprints to ...
1
vote
1answer
35 views
How to name written data that it will likely be used later in the project?
How can I give a general name for documented data that will likely to be accessed and used in the future? Data like:
outline of summary of a meeting.
a list of links, found after a research session.
...
1
vote
2answers
51 views
Project budgeting by financial year vs lifetime?
We're discussing how project budgets will be set and tracked. My view is that the budget should be set for the duration and tracked that way. Our finance team have a preference for the budget to be ...
1
vote
3answers
132 views
Delays in projects - what is normal on IT implementations?
I have some experience in IT myself, but in a different type of projects, so I would love to pick your brains.
The context is that during conversations with some friends I had the impression that ...
2
votes
4answers
475 views
How to avoid the planning fallacy?
The planning fallacy appears especially frequently when estimating tasks in software development. However agile estimation methods like planning poker etc. don't seem to be designed to avoid this ...
1
vote
1answer
74 views
MS Project - Multi-year Inflation
I am managing a 3 year project in a country where the average annual inflation rate is 12%. Instead of going through every item and entering "+12%" into the cost rate table for each item, is there a ...
4
votes
2answers
155 views
How to involve the whole team in setting quarterly objectives (OKRs)?
Context
I'm a scrum master in a small (15 FTEs) organization that's about one year into a slow agile transformation. So far the shift towards agile has been limited to the Development team, but the ...
5
votes
3answers
154 views
Agile - How to increase engagement of team members in the planning meeting?
Acting as a team lead I feel the engagement in our sprint planning session is low.
Some people are very comfortable to talk and share ideas/knowledge in order to help the team to define tasks for our ...
1
vote
1answer
46 views
Is “rolling-wave planning” catered for in PRINCE2?
I am struggling to bridge my PMBOK knowledge with a colleague that follows PRINCE2.
I wonder if someone could help me understand whether PRINCE2 has the concept of "rolling-wave planning".
From:...
3
votes
1answer
57 views
Change of business focus after a sprint has started
If we start a sprint with a specific goal and the user stories to support that goal, then the business changes their immediate requirements during that sprint. This may be because of a client ...
2
votes
2answers
603 views
How to handle large R&D projects using Scrum (or any other agile framework)
In addition to our regular software development tasks we have some large R&D tasks which we find difficult to fit into our scrum framework.
The main issue is that there is absolutely no user ...
3
votes
3answers
96 views
I need project management experience to get into a project management role but no one will hire me. Can anyone help? [closed]
Good Afternoon All,
My name is Edriss and I have acquired my certificate in Project Management from UC Berkeley on July 2017. I have been looking around the web to find an entry level role in project ...
3
votes
2answers
223 views
Is a good Scrum practice to meassure the developer team by the story points completed at the end of the sprint?
We have new teams working on scrum and they estimates all the points of a several ammount of stories. But, at the beggining, they have no reference of how ammount of points could be delivered in two-...
6
votes
2answers
549 views
How to schedule back and front-end developers based on story points?
We are used to create multiple sub-tasks for each user story and provide each sub-task with an estimate in hours and assignee (back or front-end).
With the following outcome:
Total estimated time ...
2
votes
2answers
69 views
In a data-driven startup, what should we *not* A/B test?
We are shifting our startup to a data-driven culture, and prioritising what to start testing [UPDATE: i.e. what goes in the product plan]. We have a reasonable number of users, and a working product, ...
4
votes
5answers
3k views
WBS and agile approach
I have been reading 3 books about Agile Project Management and in all of them there is no concept about WBS even in the book of the agile practice from agile alliance that comes with the PMBOK 6th ...
