Saturday, September 7, 2013

Step three and a half... inception deck

Hello everyone,

Thanks for keep reading. Last week I wrote about five of the ten tough questions of the inception deck. In this post I going to finish that...

Show the solution
This one is about to draw a simple design model for the solution you are planning to build. In our project we design a BPMN collaboration diagram with the message exchange between the sales assistant and the system and also a simple architecture diagram with the systems that we are going to build and or consume. We haven't made something very elaborated because it was not the time to do it and because it is not the goal to get everything detailed upfront.
Up at Night
This is all about risks. If you study about traditional project management you know what this is about: documentation. And that is what exactly happened in our project. We have a traditional project manager and he puts all risks in his documentation to show to the higher management. We haven't participated on this as well.
Size it up
The goal here is to measure how long it will take do deliver the project. The project manager took charge on this matter too. We got to know that the deadline was 30th of November. But we also got luck because we have some functionality built up front and we need to focus on brush up the application and we think that the time will be enough to deliver if we focus on it.
What's is going to give
Trade-offs. All in life is about trade-offs. I went to Ireland in 2010 to study English. And I loved it I wish I could stay longer but I left my heart and my fiancee in Brazil so I came back. Now she is my lovely wife even though we stayed separated for ten months. That was a decision I made and I don't regret it but I had to choose. And when we talk about Agile Projects and software development it becomes clear that for many things you need to choose what you are going to give to get the project done. To this one our project manager and product owner are going to take the tough decisions and we will be here to support then. The only thing we know for sure now is that we need to deliver in November 30th.
What's going to take
We are almost there. This is last one. How much is going to cost? Who are the team members that are going to build this project? How long is going to take. In our project we have seven team members: three developers, myself as technical leader and tester - dealing mostly with automated testing and some project manager duties -, another tester, two analysts that are going to help with the UX design. The formal project manager is going to deal with the formal process and documentation and wasn't counted as a team member. And I can't give details about how much it's going to cost first because there are legal reasons and second because I don't have all numbers.

That's the way we dealt with the inception deck in my project. There are another ways to do it but I think that for our first experience we did well. We tried to answer most questions and leave some of then for the formal process and we are going to keep one eye on them - for example the risks that are identified.

That's it for now.

See you next time.

Gustavo Fonseca

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