Wrong Approach!

So every higher up loves to get reports and statistic from the developers, testers and technical writers. Being part of the management I like this idea, and we all need this information to optimize use of resources.

Interestingly, while we need these analyses to make job of our team easier – we unconsciously adding more burden to the resources. Asking them to fill spread-sheets or a document is not the right idea. A programmer is good at programming not at filling spreadsheet. A tester can build test cases and write down defect but you are killing him if you start using him to write down effort on sheet of paper – so your company can run its PMO.

Development, Testing and documentation [IMHO] is an art – and all skilled people are the artist. What we are doing is killing their creativity. I have seen lot of good team leads and developers grouching over filling documents but can’t do anything about it.

Being realistic we need this stuff – if a company is running PMO, CMMi or ISO. and other type of the certification is out there we need this information – and believe me it very valuable information.

So What's Wrong?

Having said all this – we need to correct our approach to get the information out of our asset – our human resources. Automate - bring technologies already out there to start talking to each other. No human effort should be required - hence the term "zero man-hour". It’s a IT world there are tons of software available to do part of job, but there are some issues:

• End-to-end portfolio management solutions are available but they are expensive. Most companies either cannot afford or don’t want to invest in these tools.

• These tools does not account for current company's investment, and add another learning curve for people.

• Most of affordable tools, don’t talk to each other. And thus there is no centralized repository.

• PMI practices requires lot of information flow – more documents to produce. More work for everyone.

• None of the software gives you a good picture when it comes to analyses.

• Portfolio management software are adding more work to the teams rather than helping them to reduce 'documentation' overhead.

What is right?

What ever we do, we need this information - yet for reasons mentioned above its not good idea to jump to effort of getting your people overworked. Here is what I believe is right approach, please note that I am restricting to certain tools from Microsoft and Mercury. In addition to this please see links on this page to see how you can integrate these tools.

• Find out what makes developers/testers take pride in their work. e.g. use of a version control software such as VSS is a better choice than a simple file sharing.
• Share information on single project-portal, sharing information on MS SharePoint Server is better than sharing it on email.
• Statistic like actual-time-to-fix-defect should not come from developer - we should [try to] get it from check-in and check-out time of a file from your version control software.
• In this case all you need to do is encourage developer and testers to check-in/check-out file as soon as they done with work.
• Make use of existing technologies, not technologies that operation uses, but the technologies that your project teams are most familiar with. Think VSS, TestDirector, SharePoint etc.
• Its easy with the technology currently out there specially from Microsoft - but ask yourself is your company ready to invest?

My Effort

As of Dec, 06. I am trying to get all the process of PMI mapped using tools mentioned below, with objective of "zero man-hour", while getting all the statistic data needed for analysis. I am learning too while building this knowledgebase, I will appreciate any feedback.

• Microsoft VSS
• Microsoft Visio
• Microsoft SharePoint server
• Any email client
• Test Director
• Microsoft Project

This list might change overtime as I dig deeper down to the PMI implementation. Please keep on visiting with valuable feedback.