Imagine a small team of 5 people responsible for implementing 10 small projects per month, along the whole project lifecycle from inception to maintenance.

As you can guess it would be overkill to manage a separate project planning for each project, because:

• Resources such as team members are shared among all projects, making the project plans inherently dependent on each other.
• Projects are so small (5 to 30 days of effort each) that setting up a detailed plan and following up individually on each project would generate a huge overhead compared to the projects' budgets.

In this situation, we use a central planning (also called master planning) that encompasses all the projects. In order to emphasize team ownership and generating motivation by making things as visible as possible, we manage the central planning on a big whiteboard, as shown in the picture below (please excuse the poor quality of the picture, it has been taken with my laptop integrated webcam).

This picture raises some very interesting points.

General format

Each line represents an active project. Each column represents a week. The planning spans only 6 to 8 weeks because small projects will not extend beyond this duration.

Production capacity

Rather that trying to plan each team member individually on a long term planning, which would be very fastidious and not necessarily useful, we calculate the team production capacity by skill set and associate a color with each skill set. For example we have 6 days per week for web design (blue), 4 days per week for web integration (green), and so on. The production capacity for each skill set is located at the bottom-right of the board.

Resource allocation

Based on the production capacity, we use coloured post-its to allocate resources (by skill sets, not by person) to each project and each week. If required, we can sum up columns (column = week) to make sure that our planned effort does not exceed our capacity in each week, and sum up the lines (line = project) to check planned effort against project estimates. However, projects are so small that this can usually be done mentally in a couple of seconds.

Flags

We use whiteboard markers to flag some specific events such as project deadlines, obstacles, someone being in vacation, or anything else that is worth mentioning.

The central planning is updated every day during the (scrum-style) 15-minute daily meeting with the whole team and for all projects at once. The central planning truly is a great tool because it allows having a clear picture of the situation in a few minutes. Good and bad things are instantly visible and current. Nothing is left in the dark.

The central planning is also a key tool to forecast delivery dates. When a salesperson has to send a proposal to a client, she needs to mention a delivery date. To this end, we simulate the entrance of a new project in our pipeline and estimate when it can be completed. With this simple technique we ensure that delivery dates promised to the clients are realistic (provided that the effort estimate is correct).

We also leave gaps in the planning according to sales forecasts. Indeed, it is not desirable that all projects are implemented sequentially. For example, we plan 100% of the team's production capacity in weeks 1 and 2, then 80% in weeks 3 and 4, and so on. We can then easily insert new projects in the central planning and start working on them within the next three weeks.

As I already mentioned in a previous post, managing small IT projects is not easier than managing larger ones; it simply involves different challenges.