In my previous post I shared some tips about using timelines in TargetProcess 3 for project portfolio management. Today I'll write how to create project road maps with the timelines.
By roadmapping we understand high-level planning of a project. To be more exact it’s planning of project features. Features in TargetProcess are containers of user stories. Feature cards are marked with the green bars, as on the screen below.
Is there any other way to do a project road map in TargetProcess 3, without the timelines?
The timelines are still in development, and for now you can use a workaround to road map a project. Check the screen below. We've done the TP3 project road map with the drop-down custom fields: Q1 2013, Q2 2013, etc.
This approach works but it’s quite limited. Some features can take more time than a quarter (3 months), some features can be started at the end of the quarter. Besides, you can’t see the duration and the forecast completion date for the features in this setup.
Some of these issues can be solved if the roadmapping is done with releases. But in our opinion release and strategic planning should be separated.
The concept: roadmapping a project in TargetProcess 3 with timelines
Simply put, we want to implement roadmapping in TargetProcess 3 as on a whiteboard:
For that, we're going to add the planned start and end date fields to the features (actually, not only to the features, but to all the assignables: features, user stories, tasks, test plan runs and bugs) and make it possible to change those dates on the timeline. If a feature is selected as a card, the timelines will look as follows:
Backlog
All the features that have not been planned yet are in the backlog, ranked accordingly. An unplanned feature can be moved from backlog to timeline by drag-and-drop. Features will retain their default duration when moved to a timeline. It was very tempting to calculate the duration automatically based on the estimates, and a lot of people asked us for that. But this auto-calculated duration would actually be a forecast made when a feature has not yet gone to “work in progress”. Obviously, this auto-calc would be too approximate, and hardly of any use, so we decided to provide some leeway.
Swimlanes
You can group features by a project, team, assigned people, priority, release, state, tag or a drop-down custom field. That’s how features grouped by projects look on the TargetProcess 3 board:
You can see the vertical line on the iOs project swimlane. This is a planned start date for this project. The rule of a thumb is: if an entity selected as a swimlane has some planned start and end dates, these lines are shown in the background. The borders for releases and teams will be shown in the same fashion.
Conclusion
As you can see, the timeline is quite a flexible framework. You can select which cards to plot on the timeline. You can group the selected cards by swimlanes. You can change the planned start and end dates as you move cards, and compare the actual progress with the forecast - because you can see both. And it works for all the entities.
Next time I will show how to use timelines for tracking the project load, people load and the team load. You’re welcome to share your thoughts and post questions here.
*edited by Olga Kouzina
