Different teams use different planning styles during their project launch. For example, some teams begin by creating an unbalanced top-down plan for the project. After this plan is segregated into individual plans, a second effort is initiated to reassign work so the individual plans will be balanced.
In contrast, the team support for the Process Dashboard makes it possible to perform these two tasks simultaneously. As a result, you may wish to consider merging TSP launch meeting No. 4 and meeting No. 6 into a single launch meeting.
The tasks below involve "fleshing out" the project and creating detailed plans for the next iteration. This effort is often ideally suited for simultaneous editing. Allowing all team members to work in parallel, refining their portions of the plan, is a perfect example of the high-maturity concept of self-directed teams, and is strongly considered a best practice.
The first step in creating a team plan is to refine the high-level components listed in the earlier team strategy meeting. This may involve hierarchically subdividing plan components targeted for the upcoming project phase or cycle. If you did not previously have any documents in your work breakdown structure, you may find that you wish to add some at this point.
If any components in the upcoming iteration are still lacking time estimates, your team should produce them. These can be quickly generated by using proxy estimation tables on the Task Details tab. If you don't have any estimation tables, or if the estimate generated by the table doesn't seem quite right, use engineering judgement to produce your best estimate of the time needed for a WBS item, and enter this estimate on the Task Time tab. If you find yourself switching tabs often, create a custom tab to gather the columns you use most.
Once the components are refined to the team's satisfaction, the team is ready to plan the tasks involved in performing the work.
The simplest way to accomplish this is to apply the common processes/workflows defined earlier. Simply select one or more WBS items, then select an appropriate process/workflow from the Workflow menu. The contents of the given workflow will be inserted as children underneath each selected WBS item, and the component time estimate will be spread across the tasks according to the percentages you entered in the workflow editor. For more information, see the inserting workflows help topic.
Tasks can also be created directly by adding new rows to the WBS, clicking the icon to the left of the WBS item name, and choosing a Task type from the submenu.
When creating tasks, you have the option of using PSP Tasks. PSP Task items are automatically translated into PSP2.1 projects in an individual's dashboard hierarchy. As a result, you do not need to explicitly add the PSP2.1 phases (Design, Design Review, Code, Code Review, Compile, Test) in places where you have added a PSP Task.
Of course, the PSP Task focuses on the "personal" portion of the development lifecycle, so it does not automatically include Design Inspection and Code Inspection tasks. Those tasks should be entered as separate rows that immediately follow the PSP Task. If you follow this pattern, the inspection tasks will automatically be inserted into the correct order between the phases of the PSP Task in the individual's "Flat View" task list.
Generally, tasks should be subdivided until they are 10 hours or less. PSP Task elements, however, will be automatically subdivided into phases when they are copied into an individual's schedule. Thus, it is acceptable for PSP Tasks to be larger than 10 hours.
These workflow tools make it very easy to create a large number of tasks quickly. Unfortunately, if teams aren't paying attention, they can sometimes accidentally divide the work into tasks that are too small. If you have many tasks in your plan that are measured in minutes rather than hours, you may be falling into this trap. When personal plans contain a large number of small tasks, this can dramatically increase the amount of effort individuals must devote to daily metrics collection activities, which can foster an inaccurate perception that TSP requires "too much overhead." This perception can jeopardize your organization's chances for successful adoption of the TSP, so coaches should watch for this planning antipattern and advise teams to adjust their planning style.
For more information on editing values in the table on the right-hand side of the screen, see the Editing Metrics in the Work Breakdown Structure Editor help topic.
As you plan the work for the items in your WBS, it is helpful to assign tasks to individuals as you go. This way, the assigned individual can be allowed to provide their input into the time estimate. To assign tasks to individuals, simply enter team members' initials in the Assigned To column of the Task Time tab.
To save time, you can enter assignments and time estimates all at once in the Assigned To column. Just enter a person's initials, followed by the time estimate (in hours). As an example, the Int Test task above could be assigned to team member jh and estimated at 10 hours just by entering jh 10 in the Assigned To column.
This technique can also be used when several people are assigned to a task, but they do not all plan to spend the same amount of time. (This scenario is common for inspections - the author of a product typically participates in the inspection, but due to their different role, they will often spend more or less time than the other participants.) Just enter the time estimate after the appropriate person's initials. For example, if you wanted to indicate that the individual jas would only be spending two hours in the Code Inspection above, you could edit the Assigned To field to read jjd, jas(2), crw, jh.
If you find yourself moving back and forth between the various tabs of metrics, consider creating a custom tab to collect the metrics columns to need. The items on the Tabs menu make this possible.
When creating a team project plan, it is important to ensure that the plan is balanced. In a balanced plan, each team member has been assigned an equitable portion of the total work, and all team members are projected to finish at approximately the same time. A balanced plan helps to maximize team efficiency and productivity.
The Work Breakdown Structure Editor provides a useful feedback mechanism that helps you to balance your project plan. From the Team menu, select the "Show Team Time Balancing Panel" option.
The Team Time Balancing Panel displays a colored bar for each team member. The horizontal bars indicate the start date and relative length of each team member's personal schedule. Each bar also shows the planned end date for each team member. If an individual is scheduled to leave the project before their planned completion date, a red area at the end of their bar will indicate that they are overtasked.
In addition, a vertical black bar shows the balanced team completion date. This is the calculated date that the project would complete if the work is balanced optimally. This date is also displayed on the horizontal black bar that represents the entire team. It is easy to balance the schedule visually, since any team member whose bar extends to the right of the vertical black line is over-tasked, and any team member whose bar falls short of the vertical black line is under-tasked. For example, in the image above, Jane Smith has been assigned more work than any other team member.
To resolve imbalances, reassign work from an over-tasked individual to an under-tasked one. You can reassign all of the tasks for a particular component by editing the "Assigned To" column at the component level. Just click on a set of initials and type a new value, and all of the subtasks will be transferred to the new person. For example, in the image above, you could edit the Assigned To value on the "Component A" row, replacing jas with jjd and vice versa, to have John Doe and Jane Smith swap task assignments.
During team planning, there will be times that you will prefer not to see the team balancing panel. You can alternately show and hide this panel by selecting the "Show Team Time Balancing Panel" option from the Team menu. Or if you only need to see the balanced team duration, you can click the icon to the left of the "Team (Balanced)" label to collapse the team member bars. Finally, if you wish to see bars for each person but hide the balanced team bar, open the Team menu and uncheck the "Show Balanced Team Bar" item.
At other times, you may wish to balance work among a subset of the team. For example, on a multidisciplinary team made up of architects, business analysts, developers, testers, and others, you can't necessarily balance tasks from one type of person to another. In this case, you might wish to focus your balancing efforts on just the developers, just the analysts, etc. To do this, click the "Team" menu and choose "Balance within subteam." You can select a subset of the overall team, and the balancing panel will focus on those individuals. Bars will only be displayed for the people you specify, and the top-level balancing bar will show the optimally balanced completion dates for that subgroup. If you like, you can name these subgroups for use in future WBS editing sessions.
On the Task Details tab, you can enter additional information about the tasks in your plan.
Milestones: If you have entered milestones for the project, you can use this column to associate project components and tasks with particular milestones. Once you do this, color-coded diamonds will appear on the time balancing panel to indicate when each team member will complete their work for a given milestone, and when the team as a whole could complete each milestone if the work was perfectly balanced:
If you have entered a commit date for a particular milestone, that date will be displayed as a vertical dotted line. By comparing the colored diamonds to this vertical line, you can determine whether team members are overcommitted for a particular milestone. If so, you may need to reassign work so that each team member can finish their tasks before the commit date.
When balancing milestone work, you may prefer to see a stronger visual indicator than the colored diamonds. Select the "Use Milestone Colors" option on the Milestones menu, and the bar segments will be recolored based on the milestone they belong to (rather than the individual).
You can also highlight the work associated with a particular milestone by holding your mouse over a colored bar for a second or two. The milestone in question will be highlighted with animated diagonal stripes. If you move the mouse around, it will dynamically highlight other milestones. You can lock the stripes to a particular milestone by clicking on a bar segment; then unlock by clicking on the background behind the colored bars.
If your team has a large number of internal milestones (for example, for items such as "Code Complete" or "Deliver to Test"), the large number of diamonds may make the balancing bars difficult to read. In that case, you can optionally hide the diamonds for certain milestones by opening the Milestones window and checking the box in the "Hide" column as desired.
If a particular milestone is critical, you may wish to balance the workload through that milestone. Click the Milestones menu and choose to balance work through the milestone in question. The Team Time Balancing Panel will recalculate, and only display tasks up through and including the selected milestone. Each colored bar will indicate when the team member will complete the tasks through that milestone, and the vertical black bar will show the optimal team completion date for that milestone.
Task Labels: The Task Labels column allows you to associate keywords with the various tasks in your WBS. If you enter keywords in this column, the team project plan summary will allow you to filter project metrics rollups, to include only the tasks matching a given search expression. For more information on this filtering capability, see the Analyzing Filtered Data Using Labels help topic.
Estimated Proxy Type and Rel. Size: These columns are used to quickly estimate the size and time of a component. See the help topic on using estimating proxies for more information.
Task Dependencies: The Task Dependencies column allows you to define dependencies between tasks. You can declare dependencies on other tasks within your own project, or on tasks in other projects that belong to the same master project. Just double-click on a cell in this column to enter a list of dependencies for a particular task.
Task dependencies in the dashboard are used to coordinate work between individuals, but are not used to calculate critical path, and do not affect the scheduling of project tasks. These capabilities may be added in the future. But at the current time, task dependencies are simply a way of showing individuals the information they need in order to coordinate with their teammates more effectively. For more information on task dependencies, please see the Task Dependencies help topic.
Notes: As you create a plan and enter estimates, it is sometimes helpful to capture contextual information about a task. For example, you may want to capture the high-level scope for a particular work item, the assumptions used to generate the estimates, etc. Just double-click on the Notes column to enter comments about any component or task.
The resulting notes will appear as tooltips over the WBS hierarchy on the left-hand-side of the window. In addition, the notes will be copied into the personal plans of each team member for future reference. These notes are quickly accessible on the main dashboard toolbar while an individual is working on the annotated component or task.
If you include a URL in a note, the associated webpage will appear on the project reports/tools button when an individual is working on this item. This technique has many useful applications. You could include links to the issue tracker page for a new feature, the wiki page for team discussions about a component, or the page for an online code review. If your team has shortcuts that are universally applicable for the entire project, you can enter them in a note on the root element of the project, and they will always be a click or two away for all team members. For sites that require a login, you can tell the dashboard the name of the target page by enclosing the URL and page name in square brackets (e.g. [http://url/to/some/page Display This Title]).
For much more information on the use of task notes, see the Note Indicator help topic.
Custom Columns: The columns described above can be very useful for capturing details about the components and tasks in your plan. But if you need to capture project, team, or organization-specific values, you can create custom columns as well. See the help topic on Editing WBS Metrics for more information.
As you work, save the work breakdown structure periodically by clicking the Save button on the toolbar.
If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active. Your WBS changes will not be fully saved until the sync client reports that all files are published and up-to-date.