Ramblings And Musings

I’ve always found myself in the situation where I need to keep track of the list of things to do (or plan to do), especially when it comes to developing systems and managing projects. The problem is that there aren’t any tools out there that is simple enough to use, where the process of tracking does not become a significant overhead. I really liked XPlanner, but the problem it is that it’s trying to satisfy way too many people and the process of project planning/tracking can sometimes really be an overhead, especially when it comes to managing the stories and tasks.

The way I like to think of a project is that it is defined as a set of stories, and each story is defined as a set of tasks. To track a project, and ensure that you can meet your deadlines and delivery dates, the estimates (metric should always be in no. of hours!) should really be assigned at the task level – NOT at the story level. Stories should be best described as an atomic user case in a system, and the underlying tasks should define the implementation of the story. Think of it this way – a story is a plan/proposal and the tasks actually get you there.

So, ideally for me, a project planning tool should capture these fundamentals:

• Each project has a set of stories
• Each story has a set of tasks
• Each task should have an estimate no. of hours
• Each developer adds hours spent to a task
• Each iteration should be defined as a set of stories (from any project)
• Managing the above should be as simple as possible, and not an overhead to the actual development of the project

The are other nice things to know: for e.g. reports that tell you how far along you are in a project/story (and whether you’ll have to tuck your tail between your legs to senior management in the weekly review). But I’ll get back to this later.

XPlanner is the closes tool out there that manages to get most things right. However, it can be a little clunky when you actually get down to managing tasks and story. I used it about a year back and maybe it has moved on. The clunky interface is actually a burden on the developer. I was working on a pretty high profile project in my bank when I was using XPlanner, and I found that the developers were spending more time surfing through the tool, trying to look for one single feature (for e.g. adding hours to a task), rather than developing. Now, this is an investment bank, where 3 developers wasting 20 minutes each a day is a big major NO NO practice. Every minute counts! So, XPlanner was not ideal for me.

Coming back to project management. Let me reiterate the traditional constraints: scope, quality, time and cost. Very important to always keep this in mind when running any project. I have found that many project managers are actually missing these fundamentals when pushing for projects to meet deadlines and not reporting back to management/clients on these. There will be times where the clients are really impatient, and won’t really understand the constraints. But generally, most of them do understand it and will decide on which of the fundamentals they would like to have delivered (Funnily enough, I’ve found that at times quality is not one of the fundamentals in Investment Banking. However time is almost always one of that clients would like delivered).

From my experience in the past, you can at most keep 2 or even 3 of the fundamentals at any one time, and your tool that you use for managing projects should relay this information to you as clearly as possible. The problem here is that I have yet to find a tool out there that can do this seamlessly.

The other issue that I noticed is that the development team that I used to manage always worked on multiple projects. No matter what period of the year it was, there was always 2 to 3 concurrent projects running for a team of 5-6 developers. This is a constraint that I have seen in many project management tools out there. They tend to defined an iteration based on a project. So, project A will have a current iteration and you can add stories A1, A2 and A3 to it and kick off the iteration. This never worked for me, at work and on my own personal projects. I needed a tool that I could arbitrarily define an iteration as a delivery target for a number of projects and systems (time constraint). In each one of these iterations, we will deliver some functionality/fixes (scope constraint) given the current resource levels (cost constraint). So, what does this really mean ? Say, I had a release cycle of every 2 weeks. Within those 2 weeks I really need to convey to all the business lines that I can deliver parts of project A and B. Within those 2 weeks, I will get out functionally defined by stories A1, A2, B1, B2 and B3. I kick off the iteration and keep track on how they are progressing. There will be ongoing risks that I will convey back to the clients. My tool will tell me how much work is outstanding, and I can then give early warnings to the business that we need to readjust our constraints. Sound simple enough ? Again, no tool.

Long and short of it – I decided to write my own project tracking tool. I’ve put it up on XP-Dev.com. Its currently only single user: i.e. if you’re in a team, then you can’t really collaborate with each other on the projects. Its a little rusty here and there, but it does what it says on the tin. At any one point, I can see where I stand on all my outstanding work and projects.

I use it extensively for my personal projects and seems to work pretty good. The one thing I really liked about XPlanner (and I’ve shamelessly copied) is the task list. At any one point I can see the tasks that are outstanding to me from all projects and keep knocking them one by one off the list. This is follows the Getting Things Done time management (Next Actions list).

Give it a go, and if you have any requests, please do contact me and I’ll ensure that it gets done.