Agile Project Management on the Clouds. Part III.

Project Tracking

Preliminary Plan we created was appoved by Customer and we're in development stage now. But work with plans and schedules doesn't stop at this point. Now we'll work with Iteration Plans. Good news is that we have freedom in re-scheduling tasks and resources. But milestone and task sets for each Iteration are constant.

I like using the term Orchestration in appliance to Iteration Plan. During Iteration you will see that certain tasks need more time than it was estimated before, some tasks need less time. You will be faced with real-life circumstances when one of your developers fall ill and another one have to pass university exam. All these changes have to be reflected by resource and task re-arrangements.

Let's consider some real-life example. Imagine you are going to create separate document in Ganttzilla named "Golf Club Functional Iteration #2". This can be done by downloading Preliminary Plan after pressing "Download" button and then creating new document on the basis of downloaded one with "Upload File" option:

Afterwards we can cut all tasks except Functionality Iteration #2 tasks. Before doing the cut please don't forget to set up proper value in "Must Start on" field of Functionality Iteration #2 task group:


Finally we'll have the following picture:


It's time to Track the Iteration Plan! Imagine that Team Lead will be responsible for updating this plan. He will mark progress of each task on the daily basis and also he will update tasks' start-dates, durations and resources to reflect day-to-day orchestration.

First step towards this approach is moving original Iteration Plan to Team Lead's document space in Ganttzilla. To share your plan you can press "Share" button in viewer mode and specify Team Lead's email in the following form:


The last part of the story is marking progress for Iteration Plan tasks. Imagine you are Team Lead who received invitation email to open shared Functional Iteration plan. You follow the link in this email and download the project plan file. Then you upload this file as new Ganttzilla document and share it with Project Manager.

To mark tasks' progress go to the Gantt editor and click on task blue bar. As a result "Edit Task" form appears. Now enter some progress value into Percentage complete field and press OK:


Corresponding progress line will be rendered inside the task bar.




Now you know all rules of the game. Your job is to keep progress in agreement with current date. You can play with tasks relocation, resources, relations. Orchestration is your main weapon in this game.

Enjoy Planning!