Operational plans in Redmine without additional plug-ins
After reading a few good articles on the organization of operational planning using Redmine tools (for example, here ), I decided to share my experience and write about how operational planning is implemented in our company.
By operational planning, I understand the creation of a prioritized list of tasks for a specific actor for a given time interval. Accordingly, the total assessment of the labor intensity for all tasks from the list should correspond approximately to the total working time at a given interval.
Sprint - the time interval for which the plan is created (the term is taken from Scrum, and its meaning is the same).
The operational plan of the employee - a list of tasks assigned to a specific artist for the sprint.
In developing the concept of operational planning, ideas and concepts of Scrum were used, although we do not use this methodology.
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First of all, it is necessary to understand - who needs an operational plan and what is the use of it?
The operational plan allows employees to work for a short period of time (we use a sprint of 1 week duration), giving it access to the entire horizon of tasks for this period, which undoubtedly increases the employees' faith in the adequacy, foresight and professionalism of managers. The alternative is to assign tasks to performers one or two, as they become available and ready to work. This is convenient for some managers, but not like the performers.
The experience of using operational plans has shown that their use is most effective in separate cross-project groups (services), such as technical writers, the core product development team, the third line of technical support, etc. At the same time, in the project teams, the described concept of operational planning did not take root, since its main idea - visualization of the load and the list of tasks of the contractor - did not interest project managers (they already control the load of people and task priorities, combining flexible and rigid management methods, so that an additional limitation in the form of drawing up a list of tasks for the week and following it prevents him).
It makes sense to implement operational planning if:
Why is it proposed to use Redmine for operational plans, rather than specialized software like MS Projects? Because the operational plans are created in many respects for the performers, and not for the managers. In addition, operational planning in Redmine allows you to work with the most detailed and decomposed tasks. Create and, most importantly, maintain the relevance of such a plan in MS Project is difficult.
The peculiarity of the proposed organization of operational planning through Redmine is that it is proposed to use only custom fields and standard task filtering, and there is no need to install and study any additional plug-ins (both paid and free).
It is necessary:
Here is a coupon with new fields:
This is the operational plan in Redmine:
If desired, it can be easily downloaded to MS Excel or PDF using Redmine:
Unfortunately, as they say, "simplicity requires sacrifice." And in this case, this sacrifice is the inconvenience of collecting the planning history of the task for sprints. For example, to answer the question “how much time was planned for this task in each sprint during the last month?”, You will have to collect this information on messages about changes in the corresponding fields in the history of coupon changes, because The fields “Sprint time evaluation” and “Order of execution” will be overwritten every week. However, experience has shown that such statistics are rarely required - usually the entire analysis of the implementation of the plan occurs once at the end of the sprint (in retrospect).
The described concept was developed as temporary until a more advanced operational planning system is implemented in the company. But there is nothing more permanent than temporary - the scheme has been working successfully for over a year.
I will be glad to answer your questions and learn your operational planning experience.
By operational planning, I understand the creation of a prioritized list of tasks for a specific actor for a given time interval. Accordingly, the total assessment of the labor intensity for all tasks from the list should correspond approximately to the total working time at a given interval.
Determine the terminology
Sprint - the time interval for which the plan is created (the term is taken from Scrum, and its meaning is the same).
The operational plan of the employee - a list of tasks assigned to a specific artist for the sprint.
In developing the concept of operational planning, ideas and concepts of Scrum were used, although we do not use this methodology.
')
First of all, it is necessary to understand - who needs an operational plan and what is the use of it?
The operational plan allows employees to work for a short period of time (we use a sprint of 1 week duration), giving it access to the entire horizon of tasks for this period, which undoubtedly increases the employees' faith in the adequacy, foresight and professionalism of managers. The alternative is to assign tasks to performers one or two, as they become available and ready to work. This is convenient for some managers, but not like the performers.
The experience of using operational plans has shown that their use is most effective in separate cross-project groups (services), such as technical writers, the core product development team, the third line of technical support, etc. At the same time, in the project teams, the described concept of operational planning did not take root, since its main idea - visualization of the load and the list of tasks of the contractor - did not interest project managers (they already control the load of people and task priorities, combining flexible and rigid management methods, so that an additional limitation in the form of drawing up a list of tasks for the week and following it prevents him).
Prerequisites for successful implementation of operational plans
It makes sense to implement operational planning if:
- A group of performers performs the same type of specialized tasks (as on the pipeline). An example is minor software improvements at the request of users in the third line of technical support;
- Tasks are not super urgent (they may be in the queue for some time);
- The priority of tasks rarely changes;
- Super-important tasks that automatically rise to the top of the list and shift other tasks rarely come;
- The duration of the tasks usually does not exceed the time of the sprint (mostly less).
It turns out that the operational plan is needed for
- Employees of groups that work with a large number of small tasks in duration, and the tasks themselves may come from various sources;
- Managers, like technical directors and department heads, who want to know how employees are loaded, whether task priorities are right.
Why is it proposed to use Redmine for operational plans, rather than specialized software like MS Projects? Because the operational plans are created in many respects for the performers, and not for the managers. In addition, operational planning in Redmine allows you to work with the most detailed and decomposed tasks. Create and, most importantly, maintain the relevance of such a plan in MS Project is difficult.
Technical implementation
The peculiarity of the proposed organization of operational planning through Redmine is that it is proposed to use only custom fields and standard task filtering, and there is no need to install and study any additional plug-ins (both paid and free).
It is necessary:
- Include a ticket for the task in the plan. those. in a certain sprint. To do this, create a custom field "Sprint" type "List with multiple values." The list of values ​​is week numbers, like “Week 35”, since we have weekly sprints (a multiplicity of choice is needed if the task is performed during several sprints);
- Specify how much time during the sprint is supposed to spend on the implementation of this task (since the task, for example, may have an estimate of the labor intensity of 50 hh, and the sprint contains only 40 working hh.). To do this, create a custom field "Estimate of time for a sprint" of the type "Integer" or "Float", depending on how accurately you estimate the complexity of the tasks;
- Determine the sequence of tasks. To do this, create a custom field "Queue of execution" of the type "Integer". In this field, simply put the number of the task in the queue for execution within the current sprint, i.e. for the first task to perform - 1, for the second - 2, etc. Next, the list is ranked by this field using standard Redmine tools in the task list.
Here is a coupon with new fields:
This is the operational plan in Redmine:
If desired, it can be easily downloaded to MS Excel or PDF using Redmine:
Unfortunately, as they say, "simplicity requires sacrifice." And in this case, this sacrifice is the inconvenience of collecting the planning history of the task for sprints. For example, to answer the question “how much time was planned for this task in each sprint during the last month?”, You will have to collect this information on messages about changes in the corresponding fields in the history of coupon changes, because The fields “Sprint time evaluation” and “Order of execution” will be overwritten every week. However, experience has shown that such statistics are rarely required - usually the entire analysis of the implementation of the plan occurs once at the end of the sprint (in retrospect).
Now the answer to the second question - what is the use of such operational plans?
- Employees are calmer and more comfortable to perform tasks when they see the list for some time in advance and know that this list will be changed only as a last resort;
- It is easier for managers to form such a plan at the beginning of a sprint (for example, once a week) than to distribute each incoming task;
- It takes 10-15 minutes for each artist to draw up an operational plan for a week, which is incomparably less time consuming than updating the plan in MS Project in the same way;
- The distribution of tasks by specific performers can be delegated to a team lead, denoting a common list of tasks;
- The transparency of work planning is increased: any employee (manager or performer) can go into Redmine and view the operational plan of another employee without unnecessary questions and bureaucracy;
- The general culture of management is increasing: managers and those interested can hear that the operational plan can be adjusted only as a last resort with the agreement of, for example, the technical director. Therefore, it is necessary to prepare in advance a list of tasks and determine their priorities. I did not have time to plan the tasks for the sprint - wait for the next distribution;
Some "life hack" when working with operational plans (it turned out also by experience)
- In connection with the dynamics of the receipt of tasks, possible errors in the assessment of labor intensity and another unforeseen headache, it makes sense to plan tasks not for the entire duration of the sprint, but to leave some time buffer. We have this stock - 8 hours, i.e. we plan 32 hh for the weekly sprint;
- The original source of the plan should be a filtered list of tasks in the Redmine (as in the second picture). However, to fix a plan right after its creation, it is best to unload it with a snapshot (in MS Excel or PDF format) - similar to the MS Project basic plan. Further, this fixed operational plan can be sent to interested parties, and also be used in retrospect at the end of the sprint;
- For convenience of working with the operational plan according to the described concept, it is most convenient to use the types of trackers and transition schemes from my previous article .
The described concept was developed as temporary until a more advanced operational planning system is implemented in the company. But there is nothing more permanent than temporary - the scheme has been working successfully for over a year.
I will be glad to answer your questions and learn your operational planning experience.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/265287/
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