Team Focus

Early in a Plan Track, a team identifies, analyzes, and prioritizes requirements that fully describe a solution and its behavior. Typically, these requirements are documented in a functional specification. The functional specification (also referred to as a technical specification) describes in detail how each feature is to look and behave. It establishes a basis for subsequent designing and planning efforts.

A design process gives a team a systematic way to evolve abstract concepts into specific technical details. Results of a design process are used to update a functional specification.

In parallel, detailed planning can begin. Each team lead prepares plan(s) for deliverables that pertain to their role and participates in team planning sessions. As a group, a team reviews and identifies dependencies among plans. All plans are synchronized and presented together as a master project plan.

Team members representing each role define specific activities, generate time estimates, and develop schedules for each deliverable. The various schedules are then synchronized and integrated into a master project schedule.

At the culmination of a Plan Trackproject plans approved checkpointstakeholders and team members have agreed in detail on what is to be delivered and when. At the project plans approved checkpoint, the team reassesses risk, updates priorities, and finalizes estimates for resources and schedules.

As different deliverables are developed, it is important to maintain traceability among deliverables back to what was specified in envisioning. Maintaining traceability serves as one way to check design correctness and to verify that a design meets the goals and requirements of a solution.

Table 8-1 describes the focus and some of the responsibility areas of each advocacy group during planning.

Table 8-1. Team Focal Areas During Planning

Advocacy Group	Focus
Product Management	Conceptual design, business requirements analysis, communications plan, requirements prioritization
Program Management	Master project plan, master project schedule, budget
Architecture	Conceptual and logical design, technology evaluation, initial build estimates, functional specification content
Development	Logical and physical design, build plan/schedule, build estimates, prototypes
User Experience	Usage scenarios/use cases, user requirements, localization/accessibility requirements, user documentation/training plan/schedule for usability testing, user documentation, training
Test	Design evaluation, testing requirements, test plan/schedule, test scenarios
Release/Operations	Design evaluation, operations requirements, pilot and deployment plan/schedule, define and build various project environments