Tool Mentor: Using the Project Plan Template
Purpose
This Tool Mentor describes how a Project Manager can tailor the Project Plan template to a specific project.
Related Rational Unified Process activities:
Overview
The RUP Project Plan template is a Microsoft®Project format template, which represents a typical project using the RUP. It is intended to act as a starting point for building a plan for a project.
Two different versions of the template are provided:
- Project Plan Template for Microsoft®Project98
- Project Plan Template for Microsoft®Project version 4.0
The project plan templates are provided by Ensemble Systems.
The template covers one development cycle which consists of all phases from Inception through Transition, and a nominal number of iterations per phase, and includes the activities and workers as defined within the core workflows of the Rational Unified Process.
Where applicable, iteration workflows and activities (MS-Project tasks) have been tailored based upon the phase that the iteration occurs.
The approach to generation and maintenance of a project plan must be iterative. At inception, crude estimates are made of the phase plan and the iteration plans within the phases. The best available information is reflected in the plan, and as more is learned, the plan is refined on an ongoing basis. Therefore some portion of the Tool Steps are necessarily repeated throughout the life of the project.
The following steps are performed to work with the project plan template:
- Adjust Project Start Date
- Adjust the Phase Plan
- Adjust the Iteration Plan
- Adjust Resource Assignments
- Fine Tune Schedule Calculation Parameters
1. Adjust Project Start Date 
Set the project schedule start date.
2. Adjust the Phase Plan
Based on the determination of applicable phases and number of iterations per phase, create new iterations or delete iterations accordingly. New iterations can be easily created by copying an existing iteration. Make sure that iteration to iteration dependencies are maintained.
Based on the Development Case, add or remove activities as required, being careful to retain inter-dependencies. (This is simplified by activating the "Autolink Moved or Inserted Tasks" setting in the Options/Schedule Tab.)
Add any project specific milestones and tie them to the appropriate predecessor tasks.
Estimate durations on tasks (and therefore iterations) to get a set of baseline dates for iteration completion.
3. Adjust the Iteration Plan
Prior to the start of each iteration, add more detailed tasks under each of "Describe Business Use Cases", "Describe Business Workers", "Describe Business Entities", "Detail Priority Use Cases", "Priority Class Design", "Implement Priority Components", and set durations of detailed tasks accordingly.
Upcoming Iteration Task durations in general should be reviewed and validated. It is important that the iteration durations meet the target duration. If this is not possible, the requirements for the iteration may be unachievable.
Based on the determination of applicable phases and number of iterations per phase, create
4. Adjust Resource Assignments
The template schedule contains resources based on the workers as defined by the RUP, and the resource allocations are set according to the responsibilities defined by the RUP. There is only one instance of each worker type in the template schedule.
Decide on the roles that the project team members will play. (Team members can fulfill multiple worker roles in reality.)
Create schedule resources for each team member, and assign resources to tasks accordingly, trying to assign each team member to groupings of related tasks (eg. tasks related to a use case, sub-system, class) to maximize effectiveness.
The original resource allocations have been copied into the "Text10" field, for reference.
5. Fine Tune
Schedule Calculation Parameters
Assign additional resources as necessary to shorten durations for critical tasks.
Fine tune dependencies. The template contains only end-to-start, start-to-start dependencies, with zero lag.
Confirm working hours and resource maximum availabilities.
Introduce resource leveling.
Recalculate the schedule based on the adjustments. Adjust parameters and iteration requirements to get to desired iteration durations.
