Let’s go to the next activity: I called it every day\every week planning. These periods cannot be separated as they’re going hand by hand through the planning process. We create plans for a week and control it on every day basis.
Some key moments of this type of planning are:
- The planning process consists of two parts:
- Everyday activity of planning manager, to review current state of work, re-plan tasks that were overdue, to analyze new tasks from business and IT. Takes about 1.5 hours every day.
- Weekly activity for detailed planning of what we have done during the week and assigning requests to developers for two week period. Takes 2-3 hours of work of planning manager and 1.5 hour of application leads to discuss results, review scenarios and make some corrections.
- For planning of projects’ activities we use Microsoft Project, so there is no need of additional tools for planning. But reports listed further can also be used to track whether we do correct planning process in Microsoft Project. We use a list of reports that shows the current project state, but they will be described in the next posts, when I come to projects’ planning.
So, the first point I have to start with – is Daily Management. My team is doing it on a whiteboard for the following reasons:
- We have a place where we’re gathering each morning and discuss what was done, who has perform yesterday’s plan, and who has not and why.
- Also we discuss everybody’s plan for today.
- We can make corrections immediately during the meeting. If we use monitor – we would not have such possibility.
The whiteboard is looks like the following:
The main features are:
- Tasks that were planned and where performed are marked in black.
- Tasks above plan – are marked as green (or if developer has done the task faster as it was planned).
- Tasks that were planned but were not done – are marked as red. And developer has to put down reasons why daily goal was not achieved.
- We also use colored points to mark project tasks. So it is very easy to see in what project the developer is participating.
- The everyday team meeting takes 5-10 minutes, but not longer than 15 minutes.
- We also have a whiteboard that indicates current statuses of all active projects, but I will return to it while posting about projects management.
To fill the whiteboard the planning manager of my team uses two reports: one that shows planned tasks for each developer and other that shows yesterday plan. Using these reports, it takes about 20 minutes for planning manager to fill all needed information on the whiteboard. Main features of these two reports are:
- These reports are very detailed and used only for Daily management purposes.
- They directly show what information must be put on whiteboard.
Report that show plan for the nearest future:
Report that show what was done yesterday:
