ProjectTRACKER Help - Project Management Best Practices / Curriculum

ProjectTRACKER supports standard project planning and time / effort documentation techniques successfully used since more then 20 years of SW development. ProjectTRACKER also supports the Agile Scrum development methodology consisting of user stories and story point estimation techniques, and with this allows to close the gaps between Agile and Plan-driven concepts¹⁾. ProjectTRACKER in addition incorporates heuristic project scheduling and statistical estimation functions²⁾ supporting Lean Six Sigma methodologies adapted to the Software development domain.

A strong differentiator is that ProjectTRACKER does not force a special method or planning rigor, but allows to use different methods based on the program, project or business need³⁾.

The following table shows Software Project Management methods and planning rigor supported by the ProjectTRACKER:

There are very good “classical” Project Management, Time Accounting and Collaboration Tools available ProjectTRACKER is not competing against, but supports e.g. the initial planning via OpenProj and allows then importing the results to ProjectTRACKER. The following import / exchange formats are supported:

Supported Tool Types	Exchange format	ProjectTRACKER Support	Exchange Direction
Spreadsheet	CSV	Reports	ProjectTRACKER → Tool
Spreadsheet	CSV	Import CSV	Tool → ProjectTRACKER
Spreadsheet	CSV	MS Excel7) Grid Export	ProjectTRACKER → Tool
Microsoft Project8)	MS Project 2003 XML export format	Import MS Project	Tool → ProjectTRACKER
OpenProj9)	MS Project 2003 XML export format	Import OpenProj	Tool → ProjectTRACKER

The ProjectTRACKER supports a full change history on all effort and date changes to tasks with a daily granularity via retaining a so called Task History. Clicking on the task trend symbols opens the Task History page, e.g.:

The example above shows that the admin user has changed the Story Point effort on 18th Jan. Old value was 8 SPs. In the line above you see the new value 10 SPs (ProjectTRACKER stores always the old, non-zero value before the field is changed to the new value - this would be visible also in the current SP value in the User Story). On 27th of Jan the User Story was set to “Done” by the admin user.

With the Task History, changes in the Task or User Story effort baseline can be simply detected and analysed via the ProjectTRACKER Burn Down, Burn Up Charts, like this one:

In the example above Story Points have increased around mid of January (details could be derived by the Task History above) with the effect that most probably the target date is not feasible anymore as the average velocity is not hitting the red, dotted Planned Effort line at the Plan Date.

The trend symbols are shown in the grid displays of the Tasks, Scrum, Estimates and Schedule pages. The trend symbol gives a quick indication of the effort trend:

	Effort has decreased after the last update.
	Effort has not changed.
	Effort has increased after the last update.

Notes:

• The Task History / Trending must be activated via the TR_TASK_TRENDING¹⁰⁾ flag!
• The behaviour of changes to the Task or User Story effort baseline are defined via the TR_TASK_PLAN_VALIDITY¹¹⁾ flag!

To allow a very detailed, free text task definition in combination with the effort rationales, the ProjectTRACKER extracts / parses effort estimations from the Task description text. It is recommended to describe the detailed efforts in a tabular form e.g. via the FCK Editor table function:

Efforts are collected from all numbers in the format 123 PD (in Person Days, with 8 hours a day) or 123 PH (in Person Hours). Hours can be also entered in the format 12:34. A '-' after the number indicates a Best Case Effort, a '+' indicates a Worst Case Effort and a '!' indicates a Effort Deviation.

Note: Be aware that small typos in the task descriptions (e.g. 8 -PD) will make the extracted efforts incorrect - so better double check!

To reduce the efforts for the ProjectTRACKER user to record Program Activities, matching activities could be set by default in the Task description text, e.g. 100% verification via the text ##150 Verification Testing%%100##. This is very usefull when the Tasks strucuture reflects already activities, e.g. Scrum “tasking out”s are typically a good match to activity sctructures (see also the examples in Task Templates).

Task Templates are tasks with the Top Level Group letter 'T'¹²⁾. They can be inserted at any position via the Task Copy Option. Template tasks can be freely defined by everyone who can create and edit new tasks. The ProjectTRACKER example (see ProjectTRACKER Quick Demo Setup) contains e.g. the following templates:

When inserting task template via the Task Copy Option the parameters “program ID”, “task owner” and “task active” are inherited from the checked “copy” task. The parameters “task group”, “task prio”, “task name”, “task effort planned”, “task effort best case”, “task effort worst case”, “task story points”, “task status 1”, “task status 2”, “task time box” and “task description” are copied from the template task. This allows quick assignments of task owners to the inserted template tasks and also allows the use of generic estimation templates with efforts already included as a guideline for the estimation process, e.g.:

• T01 Small Size User Story ~ 1SP
  • T011 Task 1
  • …
• T02 Medium Small Size User Story ~ 2SP
  • T021 Task 1
  • …
• T03 Medium Size User Story ~ 5SP
  • T031 Task 1
  • …

• ¹³⁾Software Estimation - Demystifying the Black Art, Steve McConnell, Microsoft Press 2006
• ¹⁴⁾Balancing Agility and Discipline - A Guide for the Perplexed, Barry Boehm, Richard Turner, Addison Wesley 2012