[webproducers] Re: Resourcing the development team

You may want to look into moving into an Agile development process.  
Our team formally made the switch 5 months ago, after moving towards  
it for awhile, and it's been really helpful.

It involves planning your dev resources in sprints that fit your needs  
-- 2 or 3 week sprints are most common (we use a 2-week sprint). In  
planning for a dev sprint, stakeholders meet and prioritize their  
tasks for the time period, and the team sets priorities. The  
developers then set time estimates against each task, and time  
estimates are totaled up to make sure that there are actually enough  
man-hours to accomplish the tasks. If not, tasks are cut from the  
sprint.

The aspect which might be most beneficial to your team is the daily  
scrum: Each morning, the dev team and stakeholders attend a 15-minute  
standup meeting in front of a white board where the tasks are logged.  
Developers move post-its for each task from a "not yet started" to an  
"in progress" and then to a "completed" column as the week progresses,  
discussing progress each morning.

We've also had our developers keeping tabs on "extra" projects, so  
we're also tracking how many non-scheduled tasks are being included  
each sprint. It's really helped to organize our team and help all of  
us (including non-technical) understand what's happening in the dev's  
world.


On May 12, 2009, at 8:20 PM, Guy & Fil wrote:

> Hi,
> I manage the digital production group of an ad agency, part of my  
> responsibilities is to manage the resourcing of our small dev team.  
> We have a weekly resource meeting with the producers and map out the  
> week for our dev group (which projects their working on, which day  
> and how many hours). During the hustle and bustle of the week the  
> developers schedule shifts and their finding that the schedule we  
> create the previous Thursday doesn't really represent in most cases  
> an accurate reflection of their week.
>
> Do you know of any resource scheduling tools that can be easily  
> updated and shared or some advice on how to resolve this. At this  
> point I'm contemplating putting up a giant white board in the dev  
> area that the producers can update on the fly.
>
> Help!
>
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