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Saturday, May 22, 2010

Does it make sense to use MS Project in Agile Projects ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

image It is a tradition to use MS Project as a Project Management tool in Waterfall projects. However, trying to use MS Project in an Agile project makes the lives of the developers more difficult than easy. 

There are several reasons for that and a few based on my personal experiences are..


1. Adding new tasks in between as they get discovered during the sprint causes havoc while using the tool


2. Tracking  story and task completion in the context of sprint is difficult
3. Moving around the incomplete stories and tasks to different Iteration makes the project plan chaotic
4. Picturing  Product and Sprint Backlogs while using MSProject is not so easy


In addition to above reasons, Michael Dubakov has written an article explaining why MS Project sucks in iterative development projects.

5 comments:

zahir said...

so what is the alternative?

Anonymous said...

I know this post is a year old, but would you mind providing some examples of why those items you described are difficult to manage in MS project?

Anonymous said...

+1 to the request above.

Jacqueline C said...

MSProject can be used to plan sprints from a waterfall structure. A few macros can export the backlog to Excel, make the burndown list, track daily status and import metrics back into the MSProject for 'classic' reporting.
see my article at http://www.fiberplayhouse.com/Agile/index.htm

Venkatesh Krishnamurthy said...

Thanks Jacqueline for sharing the article.