Project Management Stack Exchange
Project Management Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [planning]

This tag is for questions that involve planning a project schedule or planning tasks for the team.

Wikipedia link to Project Plan.

376 questions
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10 answers

How to estimate amount of work/man hours for an unfamiliar task?

Sooner or later we come across a task in our project, with which we are totally unfamiliar ('we' as in PM, but also possibly the staff assigned to do this particular task). How can we estimate amount of time/work/resources needed to complete such a…
Mchl
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27
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6 answers

Any tips on how to 'sell' the necessity of dealing with technical debt to nontechnical stakeholders?

A number of stakeholders do not quite understand the necessity of dealing with technical debt preferring new features on top of not very maintainable code. Development is sometimes seen as kids who just want to play the coolest toys. Can anyone…
G33K
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25
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4 answers

How should a team handle disagreements about story-point estimates in Scrum?

During estimation, the Product Owner presents a user story that seems clear to a team that usually knows their strengths and weaknesses, and that is not hostile. What should the Scrum Master do if the story is judged very differently by the team…
TeXter
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25
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7 answers

Is PMP certification an appropriate career goal for someone about to start a career in project management?

Is PMP certification a requirement for a successful career in Project Management? At which point would it be appropriate for a newly starting project manager to plan to include PMP certification?
blueberryfields
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24
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7 answers

Is there any data to show planning poker produces better estimates than individuals?

As described here planning poker is a group estimating process. It seems that it would work.But is there any data to show that it is better than individual estimation? Edit 4/19/11: I am interested accuracy in terms of time-planning. I am interested…
Brian Carlton
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21
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2 answers

SCRUM Sprint and tasks/user stories that cannot fit into a sprint!

Say I have an Epic that is estimated to take 3 sprints to do. And the Epic is broken down into A to Z tasks/user stories. Problem is, to do B, we need A, to do C we need B, etc.... And in sprint one, we only complete A to E, and I do not think it…
Joshscorp
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21
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6 answers

How do you manage technical debt?

In real world, business initiatives always take higher priority as there are associated ROIs and deliver something tangible to the users. But there are technical initiatives and projects that need to be done to keep up with the different versions of…
Shoba
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19
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5 answers

Planning poker on virtual teams

I'm looking for a way to make it easier to perform planning poker on a virtual team (i.e. a team that is not co-located with one another). Requirements for a successful planning poker: Since we're distributed, how can I do something that works well…
Matt Ruwe
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19
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3 answers

How do you schedule maintenance work in Scrum?

What are some of the different patterns you use to schedule maintenance work (any non-feature work like bug fixes, technical debt reduction, etc.)? In our organization, we've considered mash-ups of the following: Finish feature commitments and…
Sean Rich
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17
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5 answers

How to timebox Spikes using story points?

My original question was raised here: In Scrum, how to estimate research stories? and as suggested by @CodeGnome I created a separate question. In my opinion Spikes should be time-boxed as there is often a lure for "additional 5 minutes" that…
Bartek Kobyłecki
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16
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6 answers

During a sprint, should we try to achieve 100% user story completion or 100% productivity

We know that during every sprint, the team's primary goal is to achieve 100% completion of user stories which are part of the sprint backlog. But what happens in practice is that, development should be completed 2-3 days prior to sprint end, so that…
Anoop
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15
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2 answers

In MS Project, can I create a task whose duration depends on two milestones?

I want to show an ongoing "support" task in MS Project, where the start date is driven by one milestone (test environment available), and the end date is set by another milestone (testing complete). I do not want to enter a duration or an amount of…
Iain9688
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15
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6 answers

Scrum and interruptions (urgent bugs, requests)

Does Scrum take into account interruptions? For example: urgent bugs from production environment requests from other teams This is very important in real development process. In practice of Scrum teams these interruptions often just happen and…
Daniel
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15
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7 answers

How should a project manager capture decisions?

As a project goes through the planning and design phases, many decisions will be made. To develop with technology X instead of technology Y. To leave feature z off of the plan for this version of the release in order to hit a hard deadline. Many…
Sean Earp
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14
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7 answers

Proof that badly scheduled meetings hurt productivity

I have a friend who is a developer. He is very stressed out by his manager, who seems addicted to meetings. The volume of meetings is a problem, but what is more of a problem is that they are spaced out evenly throughout the day. Meening that there…
Jeremy French
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