Best practice for software development scheduling

[Thomas.Scicluna]

Hi Project Gurus,

I'm currently in the business of delivering software billing solution
for large corporate and government clients using a shared pool of
resources (matrix organisation). A typical project is broken down by
Project>Phase>Iteration>Milestone>Task. During the course of a
project, the schedule is regularly changed to meet the constraints
imposed by a common pool of resources. This results in a substantial
amount of time redeveloping large schedules time and time again. In
particular, the task dependencies and task duration are constantly
shifting.

My question is this: is there a best practice methodology to minimise
the administrative overhead when scheduling software dev projects.

Many thanks

Tom

 

[Rod Gill]

Your problems are not unique to software delivery projects! Here are a few
points:

You need a resource management role to work with management, customer
account managers and project managers to help prioritise and assign
resources to projects.

The more simultaneous projects you have, the more time slicing you do and
the less efficiently your people work. Most efficient number of simultaneous
projects on the go is the minimum number required to provide full employment
for all team members. Ideally this is one!!!! Time slicing adds a minimum of
30% overhead to your workload. So if all projects could efficiently be done
for X hours, you would need to budget X*1.3 hours.

The more chopping and changing of priorities you do, the bigger the pick up
and put down overhead you have, the more job satisfaction drops and the more
productivity drops. Management must own cost of chopping and changing and
just "squeezing in" one more project. Time slicing and chopping and changing
priorities can easily add 40%+ to hours to complete project. As a PM I would
quote for hours if given optimum resources and then add hours for each chop
and change. Any PM trying to meet original cost and work budgets after 3
months of time slicing and priority changes is guaranteed to fail unless
there is at least 40% fat in the budget.

Don't schedule to a very low level. Minimum duration should be 2d or more.
If you have a lot of small Tasks, move them to a checklist in Excel, then
have one task in Project that represents all work in the checklist.

Provide each project manager with the hours per week they can have for each
resource. Leave it to them to re-schedule.

Have a multi-project reporting tool (project server or a macro driven
reporting tool or other 3rd party tool) to keep abreast of resource needs.
Use schedules as a Resource booking tool. No schedule, no resource!

Use generic resource names based on roles for assignments more than 4-6
weeks into the future. Replace generic resources with real names once you
know who will do what.

Calculate the average hours per week each resource spends on ad hoc,
support, production/ other BAU hours and subtract those average hours from
the resource's availability. EG resource doing 45h per week who spends 15h a
week on ad hoc work, pre-sales, admin etc. 45-15=30h per week available for
all projects. Set their Max Units to 75% and make sure they are not
allocated more than 30h/w across all projects.

Don't time manage! Give resources tasks for week and expected hours of work
and let them time manage how it gets done.

--

Rod Gill
Project MVP

Project VBA Book, for details visit:
http://www.projectvbabook.com

NEW!! Web based VBA training course delivered by me. For details visit:
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[davegb]

Your problems are not unique to software delivery projects! Here are a few
points:

You need a resource management role to work with management, customer
account managers and project managers to help prioritise and assign
resources to projects.

The more simultaneous projects you have, the more time slicing you do and
the less efficiently your people work. Most efficient number of simultaneous
projects on the go is the minimum number required to provide full employment
for all team members. Ideally this is one!!!! Time slicing adds a minimumof
30% overhead to your workload. So if all projects could efficiently be done
for X hours, you would need to budget X*1.3 hours.

The more chopping and changing of priorities you do, the bigger the pick up
and put down overhead you have, the more job satisfaction drops and the more
productivity drops. Management must own cost of chopping and changing and
just "squeezing in" one more project. Time slicing and chopping and changing
priorities can easily add 40%+ to hours to complete project. As a PM I would
quote for hours if given optimum resources and then add hours for each chop
and change. Any PM trying to meet original cost and work budgets after 3
months of time slicing and priority changes is guaranteed to fail unless
there is at least 40% fat in the budget.

Don't schedule to a very low level. Minimum duration should be 2d or more.
If you have a lot of small Tasks, move them to a checklist in Excel, then
have one task in Project that represents all work in the checklist.

Provide each project manager with the hours per week they can have for each
resource. Leave it to them to re-schedule.

Have a multi-project reporting tool (project server or a macro driven
reporting tool or other 3rd party tool) to keep abreast of resource needs.
Use schedules as a Resource booking tool. No schedule, no resource!

Use generic resource names based on roles for assignments more than 4-6
weeks into the future. Replace generic resources with real names once you
know who will do what.

Calculate the average hours per week each resource spends on ad hoc,
support, production/ other BAU hours and subtract those average hours from
the resource's availability. EG resource doing 45h per week who spends 15h a
week on ad hoc work, pre-sales, admin etc. 45-15=30h per week availablefor
all projects. Set their Max Units to 75% and make sure they are not
allocated more than 30h/w across all projects.

Don't time manage! Give resources tasks for week and expected hours of work
and let them time manage how it gets done.

That sounds like some very good stuff, Rod! Software development in a
nutshell.