Exercise 5 - High-Level Plan in MS Project Gantt (due before class)

Exercise Objectives

The main objective of this exercise is to become familiar with Microsoft (MS) Project by:

• Creating user stories in a gantt chart 
• Adding detailed tasks in to the gantt chart
• Organizing detailed tasks within user stories  
• Creating an easily understandable rolled up gantt chart in your gantt that shows the user story descriptions, start and end dates, and timeline bars on the right side.

NOTE: The instructions for Step 2 will reflect how you will create your tasks, user stories, and inception and project wrap-up phases for GP2 and your client project. However, to keep this exercise brief, we have removed most of the details that you would need to include in an actual detailed plan for GP2 and your client project in this step.

Step 1: Use MS Project to create a detailed plan for a user story

Recall the donor history report user story example from class.  See slides posted on Modules if needed.  Break this user story down into actionable ADCRD tasks and assign durations to each task and predecessors where appropriate. NOTE: We're not grading you on the exact durations but your ability to create a user story with detailed tasks grouped by indented ADCRD sub-categories.  The purpose of this step is to get comfortable with creating user stories and tasks in MS Project and organizing the tasks into ADCRD sub-categories.  This will help you be more comfortable for doing this on GP2.  Note: you can also add predecessors and tasks dependencies at a User Story level, sub-category (i.e. ADCRD) level), or task level.  

Step 2: Add Inception Phase, additional User Stories, and Project Wrap-up

Use the details in the table below to add an inception phase, additional user stories, and the project wrap-up phase to your plan. The table includes phase/user story description, predecessors (aka dependencies), and durations in days. Note that on GP2 and your Client project you will have to build in the ADCRD sub-categories, tasks within each sub-category, assigned resources, and durations at the task-level; however, for this exercise we're keeping it simple and just about practice. The overall goal of this part of the exercise is to build a high-level plan in MS Project or Project Manager Links to an external site., which you will then use to create a rolled up gantt chart. This will help familiarize you with planning in a gantt chart. 

Step 3: Create a rolled up Gantt Chart

Create a readable Gantt Chart that meets the following criteria:

• It should be “collapsed” so that only the Inception phase, user stories, and the Project Wrap-up phase are visible in their own rows
• All user stories, the Inception phase, and the Wrap-up phase must be connected by arrows to show dependencies.
• The Inception Phase, user stories, and Wrap-up Phase on the left side should be legible along with start and end dates.  On the right side, the timeline bars with dependancy lines should be visible.
• Make sure your high-level plan is legible and not hard for the client to read.  Remember that this should depict the schedule at a high-level so that the client understands the schedule.

Deliverable: Electronic copy of the collapsed gantt chart of the plan you created in steps 1-3 on one page (e.g. pdf or jpg) submitted to Canvas. We must be able to open it on a Mac or PC without Project to view and read the diagram so make sure you don't turn in an MS Project file.  Be sure that the gantt is clean visually and easy to understand.  If you think a client could make sense of it then you're good.   

MS Project Alternative: Feel free to check out the online SaaS tool called Project Manager Links to an external site..