The Program Manager is expected to build credibility, establish rapport, and maintain communication with stakeholders at multiple levels. These programs contain complex activities that span functions and organizations. They were frustrated that it didn't lend itself to saying 'we should have functionality X by Y date'.Blast Motion is seeking an experienced Program Manager who will be responsible for planning, organizing, and leading multiple cross-functional development programs within the Blast Motion R&D organization. Their more specific criticism was that the gantt chart was specified in terms of architectural components, rather than on user-visible features. To my surprise, I received quite strong pushback from another team-member familiar with the agile development process, who accused me of adopting a waterfall methodology. The gantt chart suggested that this was feasible. I should clarify that the intention was not to come up with a rigid blueprint about who would work on what and when, but more come up with at least one plausible way that we could build what we needed to build in a two month period. All, I think, a fairly standard way to use OmniPlan, and I thought reasonable way to come up with a rough time estimate.

I then used OmniPlan to indicate dependencies between these various components, and assigned developers to each task, with the goal of distributing effort as equally as possible. I assigned rough time estimates to each component and sub-component, typically ranging from 1 to 10 days. I decided the best approach was to break it down into sub-components, where each component consisted of tightly coupled code that should probably be worked on in a contiguous period of time. We'll be going through a process to develop good user interaction design for the front-end (starting with user stories and working forward from there), but we also wanted to get an idea of how long the back-end would take.

We're at the outset of a project in in which, while the exact front-end user interaction design is somewhat unclear at this early stage, the back-end requirements are fairly clear (components that communicate with various third-party APIs, the server infrastructure, etc). I typically use an agile-like approach to project planning and tracking progress which provides good visibility into feature-time trade-offs as the project progresses. I've heard it said that gantt charts are a relic of waterfall project management techniques.

Omniplan agile