lets talk offline...

how can i reach you?

The current scenario is Epics/Master Stories are tracked in Microsoft Project. Tasks and sprint-sized stories are not being tracked. It's very waterfall - the BAs throw something over the wall and the dev team builds it and stores what they build in RTC. Acceptance criteria is feeble and there is no agreement on what unit testing means. While they are happy with using RTC for managing source and builds, they don't think they need to track their work. Code is checked in by doing an override since it has no connection to work items. This is a large project with 200 or so developers between the US and India plus dozens of BAs and EAs. This includes contractors from three vendors.

I have been tasked with getting the dev team to use RTC for tracking/planning/reporting. The dev team manager is not convinced of the ROI of the "extra work" and has asked me to present to him the ROI in a manner he can share with his team. I am not in sales and could use a little help here. :) Here's what I have so far:

Measure what you want to improve if we arent tracking our work, we will have greater difficulty improving our progress.
Without tracking, things will continue to be ad-hock and disorganized, resulting in less delivery acceptance and more re-work.
Once we have a period of time using the tool as designed, we will be able to predict future outcome using Velocity.
We will be able to use our tracked progress for a Service, for example, to better predict estimates for a similar Service.
Know what your team mates are working on and when, even if they arent in your cube isle or perhaps even your continent.

Comments? Additions? Laughter?

-Mike

I started out as SCM practitioner and then moved on to sales. I guess i understand your situation :-)

One piece of advice on this scenario - Never create a big issue of how they manage a team of 200 folks without formal integrated planning and tracking system. It for sure would embarrass the project manager and he thinks it is a question of his ability to manage the project.

Try projecting the solution in terms how it makes his work easier. For starters, I would strongly use RTC dashboards on web without needing to install anything additional. (More than ROI, the need to install anything on their machines freaks out most stake holders)

...For starters, I would strongly use RTC dashboards on web without needing to install anything additional. (More than ROI, the need to install anything on their machines freaks out most stake holders)

The entire dev team is using Eclipse since they are already checking their code into RTC, so in this case using the Eclipse environment is an easier sell than loading up a web page they aren't otherwise using. By default they have all the necessary plugins in Eclipse since everyone is on the same dev environment. Well almost everyone, but that's another story...

If the extra work is referring to "estimating tasks" then you might start by showing them the benefits of the developer taskboard where you can see work in progress, not started or done even without the benefit of using estimation. When you do use estimation we make it really low overhead to do for the developers right from the Eclipse IDE. We knew if we made it at all a pain, developer's wouldn't do it, so we focused on this aspect.

There are some good talks at last years Innovate conference on a company using planning and tracking (non-agile) and (agile). If you have access to those there was one by Panasonic that was especially good on this topic.

Here are some of the benefits they realized just using the planning and tracking (initially):

Soft Benefits:
Opportunity to become better project managers
Changed relationships
Between teams
Between managers and developers
Improved moral

Hard Benefits:
Less meetings
Effective management to planned reuse
And the efficiencies gained
Improved Estimation Quality
Setting Expectations
Hard Evidence Data right there

In RTC 3.0 we can also project work items against a timeline so you can see a dynamic roadmap in the schedule view. The progress and load bars are also dynamic so you can immediately see the impact of adding a task to a developer at both the individual and team level.

If all that fails, tell him/her it's good for their resume to be up to speed on the latest agile tools and methods using Rational Team Concert. That usually works! Good luck. Send me email if you need slides.

--Rolf