Questions tagged [planning]
This tag is for questions that involve planning a project schedule or planning tasks for the team.
314
questions
5
votes
3answers
292 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
56 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
39 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
100 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
112 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
132 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
92 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
56 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
89 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
147 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
125 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
82 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
108 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
3answers
98 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
125 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
47 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
181 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
220 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
89 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
34 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
41 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
129 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
429 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
58 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
131 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
136 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
43 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
56 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
418 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
92 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
202 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
422 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
67 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
2k 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 ...
1
vote
1answer
112 views
WBS and Project Planning
It can look like repetitive, but I come again with the same question from here about WBS and planning deliverables.
I was "advised" in a meeting recently to include a planning deliverable leg. And ...
1
vote
1answer
118 views
How to create a “smart” checklist in excel or google sheets?
We have a need to create a template checklist for our workflow and at a past job we had a template checklist that had various tabs for each process of the workshare that needed to be complete. For ...
1
vote
1answer
40 views
What exactly is information change?
A few companies talk about 'information change' as part of their analytics group, for example here: http://graduates.westpacgroup.com.au/graddetails/business-performance-analytics
What does this mean?...
6
votes
3answers
150 views
How to provide traditional upper management early analyses in an agile project?
I was discussing moving our process to become more agile with our (mostly traditional) Chief Information Officer (CIO).
The CIO's stance was that >=80% of the requirements need to be defined (and set ...
1
vote
2answers
429 views
How to organize a 6-month project plan for agile?
We have a charter to build a product in 6 months. I'll preface this by saying that my manager wants us to use waterfall, even though our development process is agile.
With that said, I have been ...
3
votes
3answers
135 views
Should we encourage a team member adding a feature on his own?
Recently I had a colleague that implemented a feature without being in the plan or discussed in detail but on his own time during the weekend.
The feature was discussed briefly, it is a technical ...
1
vote
4answers
99 views
Is it possible to control a project without start date and durations?
In a discussion about the project plan with my team we collected activities, brought them into order and defined end dates. When we came to defining start dates and durations one of the elder team ...
3
votes
5answers
288 views
Is it possible to give accurate estimates and planning without tracking time for tasks?
I work within a small team of developers. We don't track our time so we have no data to work off when we give estimates. Basically, I'm wondering if it's possible to have a successful plan and give ...
2
votes
1answer
137 views
How to keep a PRINCE2 project lean?
I gathered some project management experience (I consider myself an advanced beginner) and some time ago I attended the PRINCE2 courses successfully. Now I'd like to conduct my next project using ...
2
votes
1answer
113 views
Who should attend Nexus Sprint Planning?
I started to learn the Nexus framework and found one interesting sentence:
All members of the Scrum Teams should participate to minimize communication issues.
Does this mean that someone should ...
2
votes
1answer
109 views
What is the framework “escape hatch” for a SAFe ART that is running down the wrong track?
Handling Incipient Failures in SAFe
In Scrum, there is the notion of Cancelling a Sprint and returning to Sprint Planning if the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete, or if the iteration plan is so far off ...
0
votes
4answers
126 views
How can I leverage JIRA ticket assignments to encourage group ownership, pairing, and swarming without bypassing other core functions?
Background & Objectives
Atlassian JIRA is really just a ticketing system at heart. While there are a number of agile-ish workflows and plugins available to the system, the fundamental design of ...
1
vote
5answers
345 views
How can I split user stories about money transfers?
I'm a beginner and looking for a best way to create user stories for my project and I need an advice. It's about a money transfer project where I have to create a transfer flow: Configure Transfer, ...
4
votes
3answers
217 views
Convincing my team that we need to split tasks by feature, not by work type
I'm in an agile team, with some developers, a designer and a ux guy. Sometimes we split some user stories into tasks when we think they are too big.
When doing this, I've always read that we should ...
1
vote
2answers
224 views
Zero bug software development?
We are looking into a zero bug policy, but I wondered how best to represent this in sprint planning.
Should we be planning some 'empty' story points to cover this work? Does anyone else do this? If ...
1
vote
3answers
73 views
Stakeholder view of projects without time?
I'm a PM for a small development team. We have a mix of large transformation projects and small improvement projects.
We're not good at estimating in man hours (and in fact I'm yet to meet a team of ...
