Thursday, January 25, 2007

EZ Project Management

No matter what the chosen process is or how tasks are broken up, every major project I’ve been on has been time blocked:

  1. Management decides the new system should be finished by date X.
  2. The analysts and project manager divide the amount of tasks by the number of iterations available before date X.
  3. For each iteration-task-set you divide it evenly amongst your available developers.
  4. You ask your developers for an estimation on their tasks for each iteration.
  5. They respond by taking the number of assigned tasks, divided by the hours available in the iteration.
  6. Some magic happens (scope reduction, overtime, bring in experts to clean up, implement tasks with TODO: statements)
  7. The project finishes on date X.

I’ve developed this project management process on a single MS excel sheet. I’m making it available for a cost of $1000 per seat with an annual $10K maintenance charge. Of course I can offer consulting services to customize it to your corporation at a $300/hour bill rate. Do you like curly fonts?

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