Prototype Project Management

Challenges

• Artifacts from a single project can be spread across multiple systems. For example, Google Sheets for high-level backlog planning, SmartSheet for cross team dependencies and gantt charts, and Jira for implementation. Each of these systems doesn't communicate well with each other and lead to multiple inconsistent places where the same data exists.
• For new people joining projects, there's usually very little background information about why we're doing the project and who are the key stakeholders we're serving.
• Personnel on a project can be difficult to track and knowing what teams are working on what is not documented.

Goals

• Provide a single, comprehensive entrypoint into a project
• Eliminate multiple copies of the same data that arise from different phases of a project e.g. planning, timeline mapping, and implementation
• Make it valueable and a joy for even non-PM stakeholders
• Providing background for a project is a first-class aspect of project management
• Ability to map a system design of the project to ownership teams

Planning Phases

Building a backlog

• Course grained, rough estimates using t-shirt sizes i.e. S, M, L, XL

Creating and grooming epics

• Refine rough outlines from backlog
• Clarify what's in scope
• Start to create user stories

Sprint planning

• Turn epics into tickets with story points

Progress management

• Need high level view of project progress
• Would like to see view of interdependencies and critical path of project

Ideas

• Single shared Google Drive folder
• High level planning in Google Sheets can be referenced by epics in Jira
• Gantt views can be generated by high level planning and epics tied to them
• Try Basecamp since it sounds like it does a lot of this