IT Build Sheet for SDLC Build phase planning and monitoring

One of the key elements in an IT Project SDLC is the build or construction phase. How do you plan & estimate the duration of this phase and equally important how do you monitor that it is still on track when you have baselined your plan? Although there are various ways you could tackle this, my proposition is that the spreadsheet based Build sheet I have designed has various key benefits over other approaches as explained in this post.

Estimating the Build effort

When putting together your IT Project plan, you need to estimate your Build phase (typically including Unit Testing). The classic approach to doing this is bottom up estimating using expert judgement (also have a read of my post on Estimating in general). So decompose the business requirements into required system changes, decompose further if it aids estimating and then have your experienced developers / designers estimate the effort required considering local quantity processes.

Your first baseline of the bottom up estimates will be during the Project initiation phase and may be a fundamental part of estimating the overall project effort (if an expand from construction estimating model is utilised) 

As you move through the development lifecycle prior to Build commencing a lot could happen which may affect the estimates, requirements definition, technical design etc. I would maintain 

• the original initiation level estimates
• the revised estimates out of analysis and design

Benefits of approach

Clearly the objective(s) could be achieved through a scheduling tool such as Microsoft Project or Open Workbench especially if actuals and estimates to complete (ETC) can be automatically fed into the plan (e.g. Microsoft Project Server or Niku). However, such an approach requires the tools in place, the time and skills to use the tools and in terms of the integrated systems, a certain level of organisational sophistication which is fairly rare in my experience.

The benefits of the Build sheet approach I have developed are that:

• It is simple to use, little training is required
• It relies only on spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel
• It can be handed over to a Development Team Leader to maintain and supply back to the Project Manager periodically, ideally via the Project File. Thus it becomes a key part of your Monitoring and Control approach

Build sheet concept explained

I will show you a worked example in a separate post but firstly I wanted to explain the concepts behind the Build sheet. In a short sentence it is examining the balance between SUPPLY and DEMAND within a workbook:

• Supply - the available resource to undertaken the build
• Demand - the Estimates to Complete (ETC) for each element of build scope / effort

In terms of units, I tend to use hours but other units could be used.

Supply side

A worksheet within the workbook shows the following:

• a list of resources and their % availability across the build cycle [rows]
• the days of the proposed build phase (with some extension past the due end date) [columns]
• special inputs - D(ay)/Start - this defines the cell that represents the current day position in the build cycle (when in planning mode this is the planned start of build but note this will change during monitoring and control)
• special inputs - D(ay)/End - the planned end of build phase day (for the individual resource if needed)

Some simple spreadsheet calculations allow the Supply per resource and in total to be calculated.

Demand side

A worksheet within the workbook shows the following:

• items of build scope [rows]
• build order / estimates (several columns if estimates are executed at different points in lifecycle) [columns]
• scope items can be either unallocated or allocated to the resource names (from the supply worksheet) entering an Estimate to Complete (ETC) figure per person per scope item [columns]
• the unallocated item estimates are taken from the most recent estimate column
• at the bottom of the worksheet some simple calculations allows to show per resource Demand (total of ETC allocated to an individual) and Supply (taken from the other worksheet) and a difference
• in addition a yellow box calculates overall whether there is any supply left over when ALL the demand (allocated and unallocated) is considered making the assumption that the resources can pick up any scope

Conclusion

Although you can plan and monitor a SDLC Build Phase with traditional scheduling tools, I believe that a spreadsheet based Build sheet balancing Demand (things to be done) with Supply (resources available to do the things) offers a number of key benefits. If I have intrigued you sufficiently, please take a look at the worked example which will make things clearer.