People often think that Agile is all about shooting from the hip and that planning is shunned. In actual fact, even though Agile rejects the Waterfall approach of defining system requirements for months and years before development even begins, a successful project will always be well planned and have a clear path forward.
Warning: There are lots of ways to plan for a successful project. Below are some of the practices and tools that I use for planning that have worked well within my company and with most of my clients. Don't take this is the one true way, because there is no such thing in software development :)
Since I started this blog I’ve had posts that have covered a number of topics regarding Agile project planning. Now I’m tying them all together into one cohesive post. Each of these posts reference a spreadsheet tool that I use for planning my projects. Here is a link to my Project Planning Spreadsheet.
- User Stories – Your high-level application requirements. Link to a sample story backlog.
- Product Roadmap – A high level view of the delivery plan. Link to a sample product roadmap.
- User Story Estimates – Estimates for each user story. Link to a sample user story estimates spreadsheet.
- Project Timeline Planning – Using story estimates and product roadmap to create a delivery plan. Link to a sample timeline planning spreadsheet.
- Project Resource Planning – Planning headcount and resource costs. Link to sample resource planning spreadsheet.
- Project Budget Planning – Adding team resource costs plus hardware costs, services costs, and external resource costs. Link to a sample budget plan.
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Very good I liked the templates
ReplyDeleteGreat Info. Thank you for sharing this. Do you, by any chance, maintain a dashboard of all projects, in a spreadsheet?
ReplyDeleteI have a couple of projects and have been using your sheet to estimate and manage individual projects, but cant seem to find a way to consolidate info about multiple projects and have a quicke view.
Thanks
KM Ram
My team and I use my project planning spreadsheet to estimate a project and resources needed, including the budget. I use Jira or Microsoft TFS for tracking individual project progress. Both of these tools has its own dashboard for tracking overall project progress, although they aren't that great.
ReplyDeleteThe way I track project progress for my PMO is a status report that each project manager updates weekly, which I then review weekly in our executive management meeting for our consultancy. So no, I don't maintain a spreadsheet as my dashboard, we just use the status reports.
If you end up creating a spreadsheet to display key indicators for all of your projects, please send it to me and I'll publish it here to share with others. Thanks!