Project managing with agile paradigm
Project managing is a kind of adventurous journey. These days, flexible managing methods are arise as the importance of preemption in the market is getting attention. Agile project estimating and planning solution is one of those which can be shaped pliable to where the project goes. And it also satisfies both project manager and owner, or even a board because it has many work units each derives a result from the term.
Agile management comprise 2 steps: Top view called "Release planning" and bottom view called "Iteration planning". Each has its special mission. Release planning makes the fundamental sketch onto a paper. Iteration is a part of the paper and participants focus on the part for a certain period. This is the main process of agile project management.
The basic planning unit is STORY which is not in the perspective of the task but of the functionality. Participants could consider many stories of user experience like clicking the start button and launching the program for instance. They should depict the case people might meet while using and should represent the function definitely.
Each story has its own score of difficulty. But there's no absolute rule to estimate the difficulty. If you took a story of 3rd level of difficulty, then you could rate other stories by comparing with the story. The keyword is, RELATIVE.
Release planning collects stories to develop as many as possible and rates their difficulty scores. Then the load of the project would be determined by the sum. Secondly, you should know the velocity of your team, that is, how much score the team can afford in an iteration. Suppose that there's a project named Abra which total score is 124 and the team's velocity is estimated as 20. Then the team manager would expect that the project would be released within 7~8 weeks including buffer period.
Iteration planning concentrates on stories either, but more specific matters. First of all, the team manager should know the proper term for an iteration. That could be a week or even a month, but I think 2 weeks are moderate. In the example of Abra, we can assume that the velocity 20 is in an iteration with 2 weeks period. Then list up the stories and choose some of them up to score 20. (It can be varied in a few)
In the midst of iteration, there should not be any variation. Additional demands can be discussed after the iteration has ended. Then the team can re-estimate the score and update the release planning and the next iteration. Of course additional tasks should be written in stories.
This method is far better than traditional project managing tools I think. It can show the midterm result in the intermission between iterations and would suffice who wants to see the developing process visually. And it could be adjusted though there are many variations from special offerings. Anyway, agile management is a trend.