Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 5-4
Example Agile Scheduling Guidelines
Include customer milestones and deliverables
Include major external dependencies
Include all work of all project people
Ensure correlation with daily task list, but not redundant detail
Periodically update in accordance with project management plan
This training helped to keep the project management artifacts (e.g., master
project schedule) aligned with the work produced by the development
teams. A pitfall in many organizations—Agile and traditional—is building
detailed critical path schedules that go too far into the future, and then find-
ing they are unmaintainable and inconsistent with what development teams
are doing.
The CMMI Project Planning process area expects a schedule to be established
and maintained. It doesn't tell you when you need to create it, or what level
of detail needs to be in it. Schedules can be maintained at a high level in a
master schedule with detailed schedules maintained by workers in the task
lists as many Agile teams do. There is nothing inconsistent between the
CMMI expected practices related to scheduling and managing work and
how Agile teams schedule and manage their work. But what the CMMI pro-
vides beyond what BOND was already doing was the
reminder
that we
needed to capture the process so we could train others.
By teaching project leaders “
how-to
” techniques with respect to project man-
agement that fit with an organization's Agile culture, we avoided the
common pitfall I often see in other organizations that are trying to increase
their agility—the development of project management artifacts that are not
aligned with the real engineering work effort.
5.11 Life Cycle—It's Your Choice
Specific Practice (SP) 1.3 in the Project Planning process area states:
Define the project life cycle…
