Request for feedback on FAQs (and proposed answers) (1 of 3)

My team asked me to host education for release managers and senior managers in our organization. I gathered a number of questions and wrote proposed answers. If you have experience with RTC, would you please review the answers and give me feedback on those I can improve? I suspect RTC has features I am not yet aware of and therefore my answers aren't the best possible.

I divided the questions into three forum topics to make them easier to consume (I hope). This is the first topic of three. I wrote most of the questions as user stories.

Q1. As a manager I want to know if a story and tasks are moved out of a sprint so that I can determine how much work is being deferred.
A1. I recommend asking team members to change the status of stories from "In Progress" to "Defer" and tasks from "In Progress" to "Stop Working" as well as changing the "Planned For" field. By doing so we can query all stories in state "Deferred." The task status changes to "New." Is there a way to query deferred tasks?] I also recommend using the "Deferred Work Items" report. It would be nice if I could drill down on the nodes in this report. (I think that might be a new user story.)]

Q2. As a Rational Team Concert administrator I want to understand why I get a warning when a story has no time estimate so that I can explain the answer in my FAQ.
A2. Is this a defect? Tasks contain estimates in hours. Stories contain estimates in story points. Rational Team Concert should treat stories differently and not show the message "The work item is planned but has no estimate specified." Or should it?

Q3. As a manager I want to know what impact deferring stories and tasks has on our plan so that I can determine when the deferred work will be completed.
A3. Assuming a Scrum team moves deferred stories from their sprint backlog into their Product Backlog, the team can see how much work remains, including deferred stories. To determine whether the remaining work can be completed, calculate the number of remaining story points and divide by the team's average velocity. The result is the estimated number of iterations required to finish the release. If the number of iterations remaining is greater that the number of available iterations, either remove low-priority stories from the Product Backlog (place them in the Product Backlog of the next release) or add iterations to the current release.

Q4. As a manager I want to query tasks that have dependencies so that I can monitor their status.
A4. If you want to view other tasks that your task depends on, add a "Depends On" link to the task. Run a "Depends On" work item query to view those tasks. To determine your tasks that other teams depend on, run a "Blocks" work item query. (This assumes other teams add "Depends On" links to their tasks.) We plan to add viewlets to our team dashboard so the dependencies are visible for the current sprint. I think this is the purpose of "Cross Team Expectations" on the Jazz Development dashboard. (Who can tell me more about the Jazz team's dashboard viewlets? What queries are behind them?)]

Paul Sims
IBM WebSphere Commerce