Bare-Bones Portfolio Database


If you don't have a portfolio of projects, you'll need to build a database that lists the inventory of all the projects you want to manage. A project portfolio database need not be complicated. Figure B.1 shows basic information you can track for each project. The database needs to include a field or fields by which every project can be classified and by which you can measure how the project portfolio database allocates development resources. Here field Project Type is used for this purpose. Fields Duration and Start Date are used for pipeline management of the project portfolio.

Figure B.1. Fields needed for a bare-bones project portfolio database. Note the symbol indicating the field that forms the key for the table.


Use Case Metadata

A goal of project portfolio management is to measure the allocation of development resources against each of the identified project types. To do this, you can estimate the effort planned for each project in the portfolio, and then roll the results up by project type. It is in the estimation of the planned effort for each project that the use case comes into play. By estimating the effort of each use case in a project, you get a bottom-up estimate of the overall project effort. Figure B.2 shows a table with a minimal amount of use case metadata needed to generate the reports of Chapter 8.

Figure B.2. A minimal amount of use case metadata is needed to generate the reports of Chapter 8.


Checking the Mix of Project Types

After an inventory of projects has been made and categorized by project type and development teams have allocated use cases to the projects in the portfolio and estimated the effort to implement each, you are ready to run a report that measures the allocation of estimated effortvia use casesby project types.

The query shown in Figure B.3 illustrates the combined use of data from the project portfolio database (refer to Figure B.1) and the metadata of the use case CM database (refer to Figure B.2) to produce a table listing estimated effort per project type, illustrated in Figure B.4. Such a table can then be used in your favorite graphing package to produce a pie chart like that shown in Figure 8.1 in Chapter 8.

Figure B.3. Query to calculate estimated effort by project type. Example results from this query are shown in Figure B.4.


Figure B.4. Estimated use case effort by project type.




Succeeding with Use Cases. Working Smart to Deliver Quality
Succeeding with Use Cases: Working Smart to Deliver Quality
ISBN: 0321316436
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 109

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