Roles Involved in Planning


Before beginning planning activities, you should think about the roles that will be needed for different aspects of planning for your project. Obviously, PMBOK stresses the involvement of business stakeholders during planning activities because they are ultimately responsible for the project. The importance of stakeholder involvement, however, cannot outweigh the involvement of your entire team. Planning is when your team, from business analysts to testers, come together to specify the path they will take with each other to develop great software. By involving your entire team during the planning phase, you are not only sharing the planning workload, you are also working to unify your team’s understanding of the project, creating a shared sense of commitment, and ensuring that all perspectives are being addressed. In this way, you will be working to minimize the ambiguity that surrounds every project, which will ultimately help increase the predictability and stability of your project.

It’s important to stress that planning is rarely done in isolation and typically requires your entire team, including those playing the Business Analyst role. The MSF process guidance for both MSF Agile and MSF for CMMI provides you with information about planning work streams related to each process type. Each of these work streams identifies the participating roles broken down by the roles responsible for the work stream and those consulted during the work stream to help achieve the desired result. For example, MSF Agile specifies a work stream that is called Plan an Iteration. Technically, this workstream is part of the Build track in MSF Agile; however, it clearly incorporates some level of planning that will need to be done by you and your team. The Plan an Iteration workstream focuses on determining the type of work that your team must perform during a particular iteration. This work stream identifies the project manager as ultimately responsible for this work; however, you will need to involve those team members playing the Business Analyst, Architect, Developer, and Tester roles, and these members will be the primary source of most decisions and estimates.

It cannot be overstressed that your team should also include your customer as much as possible throughout planning exercises. Using this method will not only help you produce better planning results, such as better estimates and a more realistic schedule, but it will also create a shared sense of accountability and enhanced communication between your team members and your customer. Developing the “we’re all in this together” mentality increases the chances of success. In fact, in eXtreme .NET: Introducing eXtreme Programming Techniques to .NET Developers (Addison Wesley), Dr. Neil Roodyn writes that in eXtreme Programming (XP), which is a set of software development practices that extend Agile software development principles, planning activities are performed as part of a planning game. Planning games have the entire team including the customer help to derive estimates and timeframes for the delivery of features. In eXtreme Programming, planning takes the form of a cooperative game whereby all participants attempt to work toward the same goal: to produce the maximum value of the software. The planning game works to ensure that all information is out in the open, and more importantly, that everyone is aware of the goals of the project and how to achieve them.

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Principles of Agile Planning

Agile planning focuses on customer value and team interaction during the planning exercise. In Agile Estimating and Planning (Pearson Education Inc., 2006), Mike Cohn summarized the core approach to planning on an Agile-based project. To start with, an Agile team works as one to develop a shared sense of team and goals, thus planning needs to be done by the entire team. Planning must embrace the fact that Agile teams work in short fixed-duration iterations, each of which deliver value. Iterations aren’t just accustomed to box tasks, they are used to focus the team on delivering value one step at a time. Agile teams focus on business priority and customer value and do everything they can to minimize the dependencies between features. Agile teams are introspective and adaptive, and so must be the method of planning.

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Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System
Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System
ISBN: 735622167
EAN: N/A
Year: 2007
Pages: 93

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