Effective Software Project Management

Appendix H. The Resource Schedule

The hammer must be swung in cadence, when more than one is hammering the iron.

—Giordano Bruno Italian philosopher

Appendix Learning Objectives

After reading this appendix, you will be able to: Use the whiteboard to create, post, and update the resource schedule

Note

Most of the material in this appendix is an abridged version of Chapter 6 of my earlier work Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme, Third Edition (Wiley, 2003). It is presented here for completeness so that this book may be used as a text for an introductory course in software project management. For courses requiring more detail on these topics the earlier work may be used as a companion text.

Once the initial schedule meets all customer constraints for deadlines, it must now meet the availabilities of the project team and others who will do work on the project. Because people tend to be allocated to more than one project at a time and also have other non-project work to do, creating a schedule that meets the needs of all concerned parties is no small task.

One hint that I can offer is to not get caught in the trap of micro-managing the team. An example will illustrate the point. Suppose you have a task that will require 16 hours of effort from Harry. You will be able to give him the input he needs to do the task 2 weeks from this coming Monday. You need the task to be complete by the end of that week. In other words, Harry has 5 working days to complete ...