Project Management Plan

Library Simplified Project Management Prototype: The Return of Mr. Scrum

Any project management system (be it a people or a computer) should be judged by 2 things: how efficiently it delivers the product over the right time horizon and how well it handles exceptions to its rules. With that in mind, I'm trying to put together an exceptions-first approach to Agile Project Management. Call it Argyle. That way we can all wear team building socks.

In short it amounts to:

• The whole team on this is awesome
• The best way to work is to clearly know what we're working on next
• Trust the awesome team and capture what we're doing now to figure out best what we're doing next.

Expectations

1. This is a small team which is excellent at what it does, which is creating the entity which will allow people to enjoy the ebook borrowing and reading experience provided by their library.
2. As a small team, each person is delegated as the lead in their respective area. This means we expect them to take feedback from the Product Owner.
3. Product Owner and Project Manager will meet every other day to review overall backlog, documentation, and prioritization.
4. Sprints are just milestones for checking in. We have the full list of what's needed and who's responsible. We keep moving. However, everyone is expected to demo their work from the past cycle.
5. New stories are added only once accepted by the Product Owner. Just so everyone knows.
6. Feedback sessions are to be structured as comprehensive critiques, regardless of the kind of work. The presenter is expected to have a full presentation, and the group is expected to hold its critiques til the end. It's up to the lead to consider that feedback and incorporate it.
7. Concensus is good, but unnecessary. What the Product Owner says goes.

Roles

James: Product Owner - CEO of the product. Jurisdiction over all activities on product. Final say over product & design quality. Team serves at his pleasure. Leonard: Systems Lead. Proposes and implements all systems & services for project (outside of client) as required by requirements & designs. John: Mobile Lead. Proposes and implements all systems for client software as required by requirements & designs. Mauricio: Design Lead. Implements the design of the Product Owner, as informed by Advisors. David: Project Manager. Coordinates new requirements w/ team and makes sure of updates. Ben: Project Advisor. Library Simplified Team works as a separate pod from core Labs team.

Core Documents:

• Project Guidelines: Overall project description. Basically our "charter". Overall project goals, how we will disrupt the market, etc. Guiding principles
• Project Requirements: High level project requirements - mix of grant-based requirements, requirements from partner libraries
• Phase Descriptions: [...]

How we decide what we're working on

To date we haven't had an overall, release-focused backlog, nor a process for deciding what that means. We've had features in and out (i.e. cloud sync, bookmarks to highlights) on an ad-hoc basis, and an informal understanding of milestone criteria.

• Every other day, Project Manager will meet with Product Owner to review new stories and general backlog, bringing them up to adequate criteria to prioritize.
• Every other week, Project Manager will meet with Product Owner to review overall prioritization. Project manager will update all documentation to reflect updated states.

In these sessions, any kind of feedback will be correlated to the correct user story, and will be noted and communicated to anybody on the project connected to the story (followers of the story in Asana).

Building a Backlog: New features are captured on a wiki page. Each thing is added linearly (so there's no reordering), the page just gets longer and longer. Items are given a Headline [~120c description], general category tag [what area it affects], and originator/owner [who actually knows what the thing is] Additional descriptions will go here too, but they'll be considered BONUS POINTS

Every day the PM will review the new features, and create an Asana task for it in the Library Simplified: SuperExcitingFuture project.

LibrarySimplified: SuperExcitingFuture The Asana project that represents our long-term roadmap (a few releases out of user stories), as well as our cesspool of undescribed "What's-next" features that just aren't described, or just aren't prioritized, both for the current release/imminent sprints and further out.

There'll be a category of: Undescribed & New (which is where the stories will go [each new story from the wiki gets back linked on the wiki]) and Unprioritized: which means we haven't figured out where it's supposed to go yet in the priority queue, but is described adequately to be considered for where it's going.

When a thing is going into the active development cycle [be it a time-phased release or a feature-driven release], it goes to the LibrarySimplified: NOWNOWNOW project in Asana.

Current sprint tasks are denoted in the overall category, and tagged to the specific product area. Attached are any mockups, details. Comments are to be captured in comments!

Active tasks are to be "Hearted" so there's an easy way to filter what's being worked on now, and by whom.