Objective 3: Mitigate Essential Risks, and Produce Accurate Schedule and Cost Estimates

During Elaboration you mitigate the vast majority of technical risks ”risks associated with understanding and getting buy-in on user requirements and risks associated with getting the project environment up and running. We discuss risk management in more detail in Chapter 14.

Plan the Project and Estimate Costs

Toward the end of Elaboration, you have more accurate information allowing us to update our project plan and cost estimate.

• You have detailed the requirements so you understand what system you are building. You update the Vision accordingly .

• You have implemented a skeleton structure (executable architecture) of the system, which means that you have solved many of the most difficult problems; you are primarily left with filling in the holes within a large set of well-defined areas. (You should not underestimate the amount of work left, but at least you know what is left to do.)

• You have mitigated the vast majority of risks. This radically reduces the gap between lower- and upper-range estimates for schedule and cost.

• You understand how effectively you are working with the people, the tools, and the technology at hand because you have used all three to go through the full lifecycle at least once (once for each iteration in Elaboration).

See Chapter 12 for more information on planning a project.

For each of our three example projects, you do the following:

• Project Ganymede, a small green-field project: The project manager/architect spends a couple of hours updating the estimates on cost and schedule and writes a memo with risks and how to mitigate them. The project manager/architect spends 30 minutes with the team explaining the information and sends the information in an e-mail message to the project sponsor.

• Project Mars, a large green-field project: The project manager updates the Business Case, the Software Development Plan, with attached project plans, risks lists, and other key management artifacts. The project manager arranges a half-day review meeting with key stakeholders to walk through the Business Case, risk list, Vision, and Software Development Plan (see the section Project Review: Lifecycle Architecture Milestone, below).

• Project Jupiter, a second generation of a large project: The project manager updates the Business Case and the Software Development Plan with attached project plans, risks lists, and other key management artifacts. The project manager arranges for a two- hour review meeting with key stakeholders to walk through the Business Case, risk list, Vision, and Software Development Plan (see the section Project Review: Lifecycle Architecture Milestone, below).