The articles in this tutorial series were meant to provide you with a sound footing in software development practices, even if you are new to it and did not have prior experience. They were made simple and fun, and yet prepare you for success in managing and executing software development projects.
Below are a few resources for additional study and guidance. Many of them have further links to help you dig deeper. Read more
Weekly tracking and updating the project plan you must. If you have tasks that span less than a day, you should take stock of the situation at the end of the day. But, don’t be a bossy person and jump at conclusions if the “targets” were not met.
After all, estimates are estimates only.
Communication lapses do cause a lot of heartburn and do cause projects to fail. Reporting is as important as planning and tracking. Read more
It is important to mark certain tasks as milestones to be able to track progress with regards to the deliverables of the project and/or important stages completed.
Technically, a milestone is a separate task with a duration of 0 days. This is a good way of doing it as the Gantt chart shows the milestone as a single spot, and having a task or a phase covering many days as milestone would get displayed by a spot instead of a bar covering those days. But this is a technicality. Read more
After assigning resources to tasks and setting timelines, you must verify if one or more resources have been over-allocated in one or more tasks. In spite of your best planning efforts, this is quite likely to happen.
MS Project has an option to automatically level resources under the “Tools” menu. However, in order to be effective, this requires a lot more information to be input. Within the scope of this tutorial, we will only cover leveling resources manually. Read more
Once the tasks have been thoroughly planned, the next step is to assign resources to each task. Do keep in mind that the client is also a resource and tasks that need the client’s involvement must also be listed in the plan and assigned to her.
Once the resources are allocated, durations and timelines have to be set for each task. Read more
Plan the tasks in as great a detail as possible and also organize them (e.g., by task category (UI Design, Programming, etc.), by phase, etc.). Planning the smallest details and organizing them in a structure that mimics the process flow helps track the project and identify risks early on. Read more
The first step is to setup the calendars as all calculations regarding effort, duration, etc. are based on this. If you follow the standard 8-5, 40 hours a week routine, you can probably skip this, but if your work times are different, you must set the calendars up before you do anything else.
Otherwise, all calculations get messed up and it is nearly impossible to fix it later.
The only option then is to undo all the planning done and start again from this step. Read more
Project planning is an essential step that is quite often ignored, or if followed, not followed earnestly enough throughout the project.
If you have done due diligence with your requirements and the consequent functional specification, the first step in project planning is probably already done, for the most part.
We are referring to breaking down the work into small tasks in a structured way.
The philosophy remains the same as for the development of the functional spec… Break complex modules into smaller features and each feature into sub-feature(s) till you have broken them down into tasks that take no longer than 2 days each. Read more
One of the most critical aspects of successfully executing a project is planning it, and planning must involve both tasks and resources. In addition, it is not enough to simply create a plan and start executing tasks without properly tracking the progress. Proper project reporting to all stakeholders involved is an equally important part of project delivery. Read more
