Who should ensure that the project with one product uses 1 PO and 1 Product Backlog? - scrum

Management are involved. They want to split the product into multiple streams but it's still one product.
Management have introduced multiple Product Owners and given then a stream each.
The Scrum Masters are recommending 1 product = 1 owner = 1 backlog. Management disagree.
Everyone is pulling their hair out with dependencies, it's a mess.
Who should take action and what?

Depending on the project this is possible. I would recommend looking into LeSS Huge we use this system for larger projects. You keep one Product Backlog, one definition of done, one product & one main PO. You just add extra areas or "sub" projects that are directed from their own areaPO that takes from the main backlog. The main PO just divides it more into manageable chunks and makes sure that parallel parts don't have to wait on other parts of the project to finish

Related

Tour Planning (Shift Full Utilization)

I am using the Tour Planning API to route multiple trucks to deliver many orders.
The problem I am trying to solve currently is fully utilizing all of the trucks.
Let's say we have 100 deliveries to make and 7 trucks. I want the API to attempt to use all trucks (shifts). Currently, it will, at times, use 6 trucks or however most efficiently to route. This makes sense when cost savings is your only goal. The goal of our solution is also to take into account Driver Retention. If we have 7 drivers, we need to use all 7 drivers.
This feature is not yet available in the Tour planning production version. In the future, we may provide this feature where users would be able to ask Tour planning to utilize the maximum possible number of vehicles. Which in turn will use all vehicles if the number of jobs is more than the number of vehicles. Please contact HERE support or your HERE account executive to provide more input on your requirements

How to assign "fixed work" task to multiple resources taking vacations into account

Let's say you have a small project. The team has estimated all the tasks as 300 days of effort.
I have 5 developers in the team, and I want MS Project to tell me when the project will complete considering vacations and working schedule of my team member.
In order to do that:
I'm creating a Task "Development" with fixed work "300d", and task type "Fixed Work".
Then I create 5 resources, and specify a 2 week vacation for one of the developers somewhere in the middle of the schedule.
Then I assign my 5 development resources to this task.
The problem is, the 300d distributed evenly to all 5 development resources. And If one of them have a two weeks vacation in between, due to that particular resource the work will be finished 2 weeks later, where other 4 resources are sitting and doing nothing for 2 weeks. Total duration is 70 days.
what I get
What I want to get is: work is distributed accordingly through all 5 resources unevenly in a way that the whole task finishes as earlier as possible taking most of the usable time from all developers.
That's how I would expect it to work. In that particular case I was distributing hours manually.
what i would expect
Is there a possibility in MS Project to do something like this? Or am I doing something wrong?
There are a couple issues with how you are approaching the problem.
1. Rather than just planning out the manpower hours estimated to be needed for the entire project on a single line item, You should plan out the tasks that will need to be done to accomplish "Small Project"
If you discretely plan out the tasks that need to be accomplished to satisfy the scope of "Small project", you can establish dependency (predecessor/successor) relationships between your tasks and figure out what tasks need to be done before you can move on to others. When you do this it will give you a good idea of how long the total duration of the project will take and likely be more accurate than just relying on an estimate based on the manpower hours estimate your developers give you. Find out what tasks they actually need to do, not just how many hours they think the whole project will take them. This will also allow you to plan out the utilization of your resources better because you'll be able to assign specific resources to specific tasks, and not all of your resources need to be on every task.
2. In general I would avoid using the Task Usage form.
I noticed you are altering resources in the task usage form, but unless you are really experienced with Microsoft Project I would avoid ever touching that, as it's really easy to set the period of performance of resources assigned to a task to be different than the actual period of performance of the task itself. This will cause MS Project to behave unusually, and it can be hard for an unexperienced user to understand why. This usually leads to pain and frustration. This leads me to my next bit of advice:
3. If you really want to specify a resource's vacation time, it's better to adjust the calendar associated the resource to exclude those dates as working dates.
In your situation with only 5 resources on your project, this can be fairly easy to do. You can accomplish this 2 different ways (I'll start with the easiest option):
1. You can add resource specific exclusion dates to the default calendar in your project
You can accomplish this by opening the Resource Sheet table and then clicking the Project tab then Change Working Times. If you have the Resource Sheet open instead of the Gantt chart, you can specify the resource that is going to be effected by the exceptions:
In this example you can see that I would be excluding (removing) 8/23/21 thru 9/3/21 as working days for the SW Engineer resource, without needing to change the calendar used by the resource completely.
2. You can completely change the calendar used by particular resources to be different than the default calendar set for the project.
You can accomplish this by going into the Resource Sheet and opening the Base Calendar column:
From here you can assign any calendar that exists in the project to the resource. Of course this means you would need to create the calendars and assign exclusion dates to them.
To create a calendar, click the Project tab then click Change Working Times. Click Create New Calendar on the form that opens up and give it a name:
From there you can add exclusion dates and all that.
Note: In a larger project with many resources, I would recommend not messing with the calendar for the resources at all. It just gets hard to deal with when there are a lot of resources.

Firebase Architecture for a single Domain/Company with several independent Business Areas?

We want to move our entire IT side of the business onto firebase but need to find the right architectural approach before we do so.
Here's our company and business setup:
one company with one domain i.e. example.com
several business areas independent from each other. For example: one sells bananas, another one is about facility services, yet another one about local transport services & repair
the same customer can be customer to one or more of those business areas i.e. we have centralized billing, centralized auth with SSO, centralized customer relation management etc.
every business area (e.g. selling bananas) has a web as well as it's mobile versions of the app (iOS/Android) aiding that particular business area
How do I map that company with its many business areas onto firebase?
Do I have one project per business area (e.g. selling bananas) containing the three app versions (two mobile, one web) of the specific area and one project that has all the stuff needed for central user management (#3 from above)?
What are my limitations regarding number of projects? If every business area has a staging project for its App then we'll have twice as many projects as we have business areas...
Do I pay per project or per account usage i.e. we would have one account with at least four projects I guess?
Can I have my domains laid out like this
example.com/bananas
example.com/facility-services
example.com/local-transport-and-repair
Thanks a lot for some insight in advance! :)
There's really no direct way to answer this question but Firebase is more than capable of handling this use case within a single project. Doing it that way allows for one user base and if needed, resources can be easily shared between 'departments'
Conceptually, it's pretty straight forward; but we don't have a lot of specific info to go on in the question so here's one example.
Supposed this is a fictuous company that distributes bananas as well as offers banana services for facilities and repairs and maintains banana trucks. We'll call this company; Real Ap-Peel.
real-apPeel
sell_banana_div
//here we store all data about selling bananas
facility_services_div
//here we store the data about facility services
services_repair_div
//here we store service and repair data
users //all users
uid_0:
div:
sell_banana_div: true
uid_1:
div:
facility_services_div: true
uid_2:
div:
sell_banana_div: true
services_repair_div: true
In the above setup for our company, we have three separate divisions with their own subset of data. We also have one unified users node to track the users and a child called 'div' which will determine what division that user belongs to.
The last user, uid_2 belongs to two divisions and can therefore access data in the sell_bananas_div as well as the services_repair_div. Handling accessing data in both divisions is done through code and enforced through Firebase Rules.
If you NEVER need to share ANY data between any of the divisions, then there's no reason to have a combined structure like this so go ahead and split it out into separate apps.
However...
Combining data lets you have one app, one code base and one set of users which makes it considerably more maintainable and expandable.
You asked the following:
Do I have one project per business area (e.g. selling bananas)
containing the three app versions (two mobile, one web) of the
specific area and one project that has all the stuff needed for
central user management (#3 from above)?
All of that is combined into one app, per my above example, and can be any combo or mobile or web.
What are my limitations regarding number of projects? If every
business area has a staging project for its App then we'll have twice
as many projects as we have business areas...
Issue eliminated as it's just one project
Do I pay per project or per account usage i.e. we would have one
account with at least four projects I guess?
This is more of a direct question to Firebase if you choose this path. Contact support#firebase.com
Can I have my domains laid out like this example.com/bananas
example.com/facility-services example.com/local-transport-and-repair
My above example pretty much does that - a single realappeel.com and then the references to the child nodes are realappeel.com/sell_banana_div etc.
I hope this isn't too far off the question. If so, post and comment and I will update (or delete if its waaaaaay off base!)

Parsing RTF files into R?

Couldn't find much support for this for R. I'm trying to read a number of RTF files into R to construct a data frame, but I'm struggling to find a good way to parse the RTF file and ignore the structure/formatting of the file. There are really only two lines of text I want to pull from each file -- but it's nested within the structure of the file.
I've pasted a sample RTF file below. The two strings I'd like to capture are:
"Buy a 26 Inch LCD-TV Today or a 32 Inch Next Month? Modeling Purchases of High-tech Durable Products"
"The technology level [...] and managerial implications." (the full paragraph)
Any thoughts on how to efficiently parse this? I think regular expressions might help me, but I'm struggling to form the right expression to get the job done.
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1265
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 ArialMT;\f1\froman\fcharset0 Times-Roman;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;\red0\green0\blue0;\red109\green109\blue109;}
\margl1440\margr1440\vieww10800\viewh8400\viewkind0
\deftab720
\itap1\trowd \taflags0 \trgaph108\trleft-108 \trbrdrt\brdrnil \trbrdrl\brdrnil \trbrdrt\brdrnil \trbrdrr\brdrnil
\clvertalt \clshdrawnil \clwWidth15680\clftsWidth3 \clbrdrt\brdrnil \clbrdrl\brdrnil \clbrdrb\brdrnil \clbrdrr\brdrnil \clpadl0 \clpadr0 \gaph\cellx8640
\itap2\trowd \taflags0 \trgaph108\trleft-108 \trbrdrt\brdrnil \trbrdrl\brdrnil \trbrdrt\brdrnil \trbrdrr\brdrnil
\clmgf \clvertalt \clshdrawnil \clwWidth14840\clftsWidth3 \clbrdrt\brdrnil \clbrdrl\brdrnil \clbrdrb\brdrnil \clbrdrr\brdrnil \clpadl0 \clpadr0 \gaph\cellx4320
\clmrg \clvertalt \clshdrawnil \clwWidth14840\clftsWidth3 \clbrdrt\brdrnil \clbrdrl\brdrnil \clbrdrb\brdrnil \clbrdrr\brdrnil \clpadl0 \clpadr0 \gaph\cellx8640
\pard\intbl\itap2\pardeftab720
\f0\b\fs26 \cf0 Buy a 26 Inch LCD-TV Today or a 32 Inch Next Month? Modeling Purchases of High-tech Durable Products\nestcell
\pard\intbl\itap2\nestcell \lastrow\nestrow
\pard\intbl\itap1\pardeftab720
\f1\b0\fs24 \cf0 \
\pard\intbl\itap1\pardeftab720
\f0\fs26 \cf0 The technology level of new high-tech durable products, such as digital cameras and LCD-TVs, continues to go up, while prices continue to go down. Consumers may anticipate these trends. In particular, a consumer faces several options. The first is to buy the current level of technology at the current price. The second is not to buy and stick with the currently owned (old) level of technology. Hence, the consumer postpones the purchase and later on buys the same level of technology at a lower price, or better technology at the same price. We develop a new model to describe consumers\'92 decisions with respect to buying these products. Our model is built on the theory of consumer expectations of price and the well-known utility maximizing framework. Since not every consumer responds the same, we allow for observed and unobserved consumer heterogeneity. We calibrate our model on a panel of several thousand consumers. We have information on the currently owned technology and on purchases in several categories of high-tech durables. Our model provides new insights in these product markets and managerial implications.\cell \lastrow\row
\pard\pardeftab720
\f1\fs24 \cf0 \
}
1) A simple way if you are on Windows is to read it in using WordPad or Word and then save it as a plain text document.
2) Alternately, to parse it directly in R, read in the rtf file, find lines with the given pattern, pat producing g. Then replace any \\' strings with single quotes producing noq. Finally remove pat and any trailing junk. This works on the sample but you might need to revise the patterns if there are additional embedded \\ strings other than the \\' which we already handle:
Lines <- readLines("myfile.rtf")
pat <- "^\\\\f0.*\\\\cf0 "
g <- grep(pat, Lines, value = TRUE)
noq <- gsub("\\\\'", "'", g)
sub("\\\\.*", "", sub(pat, "", noq))
For the indicated file this is the output:
[1] "Buy a 26 Inch LCD-TV Today or a 32 Inch Next Month? Modeling Purchases of High-tech Durable Products"
[2] "The technology level of new high-tech durable products, such as digital cameras and LCD-TVs, continues to go up, while prices continue to go down. Consumers may anticipate these trends. In particular, a consumer faces several options. The first is to buy the current level of technology at the current price. The second is not to buy and stick with the currently owned (old) level of technology. Hence, the consumer postpones the purchase and later on buys the same level of technology at a lower price, or better technology at the same price. We develop a new model to describe consumers'92 decisions with respect to buying these products. Our model is built on the theory of consumer expectations of price and the well-known utility maximizing framework. Since not every consumer responds the same, we allow for observed and unobserved consumer heterogeneity. We calibrate our model on a panel of several thousand consumers. We have information on the currently owned technology and on purchases in several categories of high-tech durables. Our model provides new insights in these product markets and managerial implications."
Revised several times. Added Wordpad/Word solution.

Is that possible to filter the next activity based on the user group and show in the drop down box?

I have a scenario as given in the below workflow diagram using core service.
First step is manual step author will create/edit content and finish the activity and it is assigned to everyone.
In the second step, I want to do filter the users based on their groups.
In the third step, couple of scenario
a. If the user belongs to group "A" I want to list out all the next 3 available activities, User A can choose any one of these 3 activities.
b. If the user belongs to group "B", I want to list out "Reviewer" and "Approver" activity as next activity, user b can select any one of these 2.
Can any one give some idea to achieve this?
You should turn your problem around. Yes, it is possible, but the amount of knowledge required will be a huge barrier for you to implement.
So, instead think about it differently.
Change your "Filter Next activity" automated activity to an automatic decision, and have your code that determines the group membership also determine which activity should be next
have 2 forward paths from there - 1 for the users of Group A, other for the users of group B
on each forward path, have different selection options. You may try having links to the same activity from 2 different manual decisions, I don't know if that works though.
Worst case scenario you'll have repeated activities (not in name, but in function), and you saved yourself about 2 months of headaches trying to cope with the learning curve of doing CME extensions.
The simple answer to your initial question is: "no, this functionality is not out of the box".
But of course many things are possible by implementing critical parts yourself.
You'd probably need a GUI extension of some sorts to allow the user to pick from a list.
You'd need to store the information between phases of your custom solution.
And you'd then need some code in an automated workflow activity to implement the picking of the next activity.
Most of these steps have been covered in other questions already. Did you have a look for each of these? If so, you might want to share how far you already got and where you are stuck.

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