Chase Initiates His Project

Chase has been on the job now for two weeks. His first week was an exciting time. Chase kept busy settling into his office, meeting his team, and working with the human resources department to sort out benefits and insurance details and review the HR manual. Humongous Insurance has been preparing for Chase’s arrival for some time and arranged for a week of training for Chase and his team on Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, which was selected by Humongous Insurance’s Project Management Office (PMO) and Chief Software Architect as the tool of choice for managing Microsoft .NET 2.0–based projects. Humongous Insurance has always believed in building high-quality software and will not sacrifice this principle in order to go to market earlier than their competitors. That said, Humongous Insurance hopes that the Visual Studio Team System platform will allow them to meet their quality demands while at the same time shorten their development cycles and decrease the burden of software maintenance costs. Intense training consumed his second week of work at Humongous Insurance, and when it was complete, Chase was ready to put some of his new knowledge to work.

Chase is responsible for managing the construction of a new automobile insurance application (code named Gimli) that Humongous Insurance plans to take to market within 8 months. After extensive market research, Humongous Insurance identified the need to develop a new software package that helps automotive insurance companies track and optimize their customers’ automotive insurance policies. During his initial meetings with the key stakeholders of Humongous Insurance, Chase asked for the business analyst named Dean to be assigned to his project. Dean is extremely familiar with the needs of the target market and will be responsible for helping to deliver the project charter, which will detail the project vision statement, personality profiles, and usage patterns of the primary users of the system. Dean was heavily involved in the initial market research performed by Humongous Insurance and will be responsible for creating a draft of the project charter within two weeks, a time period that Chase refers to as Iteration 0. In fact, Chase has asked Dean to develop the first draft of the project charter in the first seven days, leaving three days for revisions and final approval.

To get Dean started, Chase downloaded the process guidance documentation for MSF for Agile Software Developers from the main MSF Web site ( www.microsoft.com/msf) and gave Vision.doc and Persona.doc to Dean as a starting point for his work on the project charter document. Everything looked straightforward to Dean with the exception of personas, which was something quite foreign to Dean, who came from a traditional UML background and was more accustomed to UML notation to create actors and their interaction with the system through use cases. Dean thought that creating users in such great detail was a bit strange, but he decided to give it his best effort based on what he knew of potential users of the system.

During Iteration 0, Humongous Insurance hired the same consultant that provided Chase and his development team with Visual Studio Team System training to come into the organization to set up and configure Team Foundation Server to make sure it was done correctly the first time. Chase is excited about his project being the first in the company to utilize Team Foundation Server. He is happy to be working with a new product instead of one that requires significant effort to develop into the next version. Because Chase’s was the first project that will use Team Foundation Server, he decided to work closely with the Project Management Office (PMO) to help select the appropriate process template to guide his project. During his Visual Studio Team System training, Chase was exposed to MSF for Agile Software Development and MSF for CMMI Process Improvement. Both methodologies struck a chord with him because they promoted a mindset and an overall iterative delivery pattern that he’s always agreed with and tried to achieve ever since he first experienced the Unified Process. Both he and the PMO thought that MSF for CMMI was likely too much for the Gimli project, and they settled on MSF for Agile Software. Because this was their first project using both Visual Studio Team System and MSF, they decided not to make any modifications to the MSF Agile process template and use it out of the box-they expect that they can make the necessary process revisions to their Team Project as the project progresses. Chase was also asked to recommend a naming convention for Team Projects on Team Foundation Server. After considering that the company had a limited set of products, each having a minor release every 6 months and a major version release about every 18 months, Chase suggested a simple naming strategy that was based on the name of the product and its version. The name of Chase’s Team Project is PolicyMonitorV1, assuming that every major release of the product would result in a separate Team Project, such as version 1.1.

During Chase’s initial review of the project charter, he paid particular attention to the constraints he needed to manage, and because Chase tends to be overly cautious, he quickly created a top-10 list of risks that could negatively impact his project. At this point, Chase only identified risks and tried to guess at the overall impact each risk would have on his project if they were to occur. From his review of the project charter and the vision statement produced by Dean, Chase began to realize how strategically important his project was to the future of Humongous Insurance, as the release of Gimli will mark an ushering in of a new technology platform and a new customer base.

As part of the project charter, Dean produced an initial draft of the personas he was asked to identify and detail. After scanning through the personas, he was pleased to see how clear a picture the persona descriptions painted for him of the eventual users of the software. For example, he could literally visualize Liz, who is a very intensely focused Auto Insurance Specialist and 35-year old mother of two boys, answering questions from customers on the phone while using the Gimli product to quickly perform what-if scenarios on different arrangements of auto insurance options to help the customers find the options that best suit their individual needs. Dean quickly realized that persona descriptions didn’t just detail what the users do with a system but how they do it and why-personas provide a mental image of a real person that the entire team can identify with.

After Team Foundation Server was installed on the Humongous Insurance’s internal network, Chase quickly installed the Team Foundation Client software. Because he just completed Visual Studio Team System training, the network administrators have no problem with providing him with the ability to create and manage Team Projects as he sees fit. As Iteration 0 comes closer to completion, Chase decides that it is time to create a Team Project that will facilitate his team throughout the development process and launches the new Team Project Wizard to walk him through this process. During this process, Chase ensures that he selects MSF for Agile Software Development as the process template to base his new Team Project on, and he provides the other necessary information such as the project name (PolicyMonitorV1) and a description of the project portal that will be created simultaneously with his Team Project. After a clarification from the Lead Software Developer at Humongous Insurance, he also indicates that the Team Project will create a new repository for source code and then waits patiently as the Team Project is created. Chase does not have enough skill or permissions to manage security across Team Foundation Server, so he makes a request to the Team Foundation Administrator to ensure that proper accounts and permissions were set up for his development team, including Dean.

At this point, Team Foundation Server has been installed, a new Team Project has been created, and after a few revisions, the project charter has been reviewed and approved by Humongous Insurance’s Lead Product Manager and the company’s Chief Financial Officer, a clear sign that work should now begin. Chase takes the final version of the project charter and saves it to the project portal in the Project Management document library. At this time, he also traverses the list of default work items created for him when he created his Team Project, marking the tasks related to project vision and personas as complete while at the same time closing off unnecessary tasks such as those that indicate migration of source code to the new project. Chase also gathers up all of the risks he identified during his review of the project charter and adds them as Risk work items to his Team Project. At this point, he gathers his team together for a kickoff of the planning phase of the project where he goes through every aspect of the project charter including vision statement and personas to ensure that everyone shares the same view of their ultimate destination. During this kickoff, Chase also goes through the list of risks with his team when, to his surprise, some of the risks he identified likely will likely not be risks at all. Chase sets the state of the risk work items to Closed because they are no longer active. During this exercise, however, this team identified a few more risks that he did not predict, which he added as active Risk work items immediately. Chase also takes this time to walk his entire team, from testers to developers, through their new Team Project and clearly reinforces everyone’s commitment to the project and to each other.

At the conclusion of the kickoff meeting, his team felt fully prepared for the next phase of the project in which they would work together to establish requirements and more detail to the design, getting them one iteration closer to ship date.