Enterprise application capacity planning is a difficult juggling act. On one side of the equation you have business demand, looking for innovative technology to help improve business performance and increase profitability. The IT organization stands on the other side of the equation, responsible for satisfying these demands. The capacity of this team is limited by the organization’s facilities, the number of developers and their specific skills, and the infrastructure and tools they use. This leaves the business and technology executives in the unenviable position of trying to balance the demand for IT development with the current capacity levels. In this article for Software Magazine, Doug Putnam and Taylor Putnam-Majarian demonstrate how top-down parametric estimation can be leveraged by organizations to manage capacity and demand effectively.

Read the full article!

I am excited about the resource demand management capabilities in our newest SLIM-Estimate release (8.2). Software project estimates can now provide a breakout of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staffing requirements by role by month. The staffing profile below shows how different roles, or skills, are required at different points in the schedule, based upon a particular development methodology. You can see that 6 FTE Programmers are needed by the month of May. Producing a high-level, scope-based estimate early in the software development lifecycle with detailed resource demand data helps the PMO and portfolio managers determine the best timing for project resource allocation, and setting project start dates that maximize productivity and reduce bottlenecks.

Once the estimate and resulting project skills allocation plan has been approved, resource demand management has not ended. Tracking actual staffing at the skill and task level for in-flight projects not only ensures the right people are working on the right things, meaning that product development is on track, it also allows timely resource plan adjustments to address unforeseen staffing needs.

On Wednesday, Nov. 13 at 11:00 AM EST, QSM's Larry Putnam, Jr. will present IT Demand Management and Capacity Planning: Why Estimation Is Vital to Balancing the Scale, a PDU-approved webinar for ITMPI.

Estimation is critical to IT demand management as today's senior IT executives deal with a familiar challenge - how to balance the size of the development team with the company's software wish list. Modern estimation techniques offer critical insight into this challenge. In this webinar, you will learn the ins and outs of estimation and how to effectively utilize estimation to ensure project success.

Larry Putnam, Jr. has 25 years of experience using the Putnam-SLIM Methodology. He has participated in hundreds of estimation and oversight service engagements, and is responsible for product management of the SLIM-Suite of measurement tools and customer care programs. Larry has delivered numerous speeches at conferences on software estimation and measurement, and has trained - over a five-year period - more than 1,000 software professionals on industry best practice measurement, estimation and control techniques and in the use of the SLIM-Suite.

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QSM's recent webinar, From Proposal to Project: Getting Resource Demand Early, presented by Andy Berner and Keith Ciocco, featured a thoughtful Q&A session from our audience. Here are the highlights:

Q: Which PPM products does SLIM work with right now?

A: We're working with customers to see what products they're interested in. It's adaptable to multiple PPM systems and we'd like your input on which ones we should deliver for you early. We can work with you so you can build a customized input to your own system. So the framework is very general and is released as part of the SLIM product. We will be providing adapters to common PPM systems and that's what we would like to learn from our design partners - which ones to deliver first. (Note: if you are a SLIM customer or prospect, you can request to join our design group by emailing Keith Ciocco).

Q: You showed SLIM-WebServices. Does that come with the desktop tool? Do you use them separately or together?

A replay is available for this webinar, From Proposal to Project: Getting Resource Demand Early, presented by Andy Berner and Keith Ciocco.

When evaluating proposals, any good project manager knows it doesn't do any good to charter a project if the right people aren't available or if the cost and schedule are unrealistic. It becomes very important early on in the proposal process to be able to run accurate feasibility estimates that produce skilled staff outputs, matching resources needed for a project to the resources you have. This webinar, presented by QSM's Andy Berner and Keith Ciocco, demonstrates a powerful top-down approach, which allows organizations to do early resource planning and powerful what-if analysis without breaking out the work breakdown structure (WBS). This process matches the supply to the demand and is easy, credible, and correct.

Dr. Andy Berner has helped organizations improve their software development processes for over 20 years. He has "hands-on" experience with almost every role in software development. He is on the QSM software development team and is leading the work at QSM to incorporate Agile techniques into and enhance the resource demand management capabilities of the SLIM-Suite. He has recently published several articles on Agile methods and practices, focusing on planning projects to set realistic expectations. He has spoken at numerous conferences on software tools and methods, often with an emphasis on how to make sure that tools serve the team, rather than the other way around. He has an A.B. cum Laude in Mathematics from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has seven US Patents.

Since I work for a software metrics and estimation company, many people ask me questions regarding capacity planning and demand management. Most of the project managers that I speak with are using project portfolio management tools for very detailed, task-level resource capacity planning. They spend a lot of time planning the person hours for each task and then these task-level plans are prioritized and viewed across the organization. These are useful tools and methods and they usually require a sizable investment.

The problem is that many of these project managers don’t have a good way to support demand management. That is to say that they aren’t able to accurately estimate the key drivers that go into their PPM tools.  They need to be able to answer key questions like: Should we commit to 6 months or 9 for the project duration? Do we need 10 software developers or 20 to finish in 9 months? How much is the overall project going to cost? What alternatives do we have? Has anyone ever achieved that duration in the past? Should we even go forward with this project; what is the risk?

Oftentimes the project manager comes up with this information informally based on experience. Unfortunately, when they don’t use a scientific approach to estimating, they leave out key factors that affect the estimate and project success, like project complexity, team efficiency, and overall project uncertainty.

In the software project management field, projects go badly about 43% of the time and fail completely 18% of the time. While there are several reasons for this, and plenty of blame to go around, one of the easiest ways to reduce the risk is to start at the beginning – with the proposal. In a recent interview with Cameron Philipp-Edmonds of StickyMinds, Larry Putnam, Jr. talks about the importance of the proposal when executing a successful project. He identifies five key questions that should be answered before any project starts and how software estimation ties into the proposal process.

Read the full interview transcript here!