Getting Started

Thinking differently about scheduling

If you've used other project scheduling applications before, you may find Agile Agenda a bit confusing at first. This is because we bring a different focus to the scheduling process. Instead of dealing with spans of time and worrying about the start/end dates, we will create tasks of what needs to be done. By giving a priority and duration to those tasks, Agile Agenda will automatically calculate when they can occur based on resource availability.

In other words, if you do this:

• Enter Tasks
• Set Priority and Durations
• Assign the tasks to resources

Agile Agenda will do this:

• Figure out when tasks can happen
• Estimate a project completion date
• Deal with tasks finishing early or late

Creating a schedule

When you first launch Agile Agenda you will be presented with the project creation screen. From here you can enter in the three essential pieces of information that Agile Agenda needs to create a new project file.

• Project Title - What do you want to call this schedule?
• Start Date - When will people start working on the project?
• Resources - Who will work on the project? Enter one resource per line.

Don't worry about getting them perfect. After you've created your file, it's easy to change them. When you're satisfied with your entries, click the "Create" button and you'll be presented with the task editor.

Entering tasks

You can use the task editor to create your list of tasks that make up the project. To get to it, click on the "Edit Tasks" button in the left hand toolbar. Tasks can be entered in any order, and you can easily edit any field of any task at a later time.

There are three critical parts of any task.

• A task name - What should the task be called?
• A labor duration - How many work days does it take to complete? (Partial days entered as a decimal, such as 0.5, are perfectly valid)
• Who it's assigned to - Reassigning tasks later is easy to accomplish.

Besides that information, there are several optional pieces of data that will affect how the start and end dates of tasks will be calculated.

• Priority - Agile Agenda will try to schedule higher priority items before lower priority items. Higher priority items should have a larger numeric value for priority. It's recommended to put tasks that don't matter the order they're completed in all at the same priority. This will allow Agile Agenda to more efficiently schedule them.
• Dependencies - Sometimes, some tasks must be completed before others. To specify this, create a depenency on the depenent task by entering in the task ID (the left most column) into the "Dependencies" column. You can enter in multiple dependencies by separating them with a comma.
• Percent Complete - How much of the task is already completed?
• Labels - Labels are meant as a way for you to tag tasks with extra bits of information. These are purely for your information and do not affect the schedule timeframes. You can filter the schedule view or print reports by label. Some ideas for labels include:
  • RoughEstimate - Mark tasks that you aren't very certain of the labor task
  • Undefined - Tasks that aren't very well defined and should be thought about more in the future
  • Risky - Tasks that should be watched closely since they are somehow risky to the project's outcome
  • Optional - Tasks that may be cut if time doesn't permit
  • ISO9001 - Do you have tasks specifically related to certification or accrediation that you want to keep a close eye on?
  These are only a few examples of the types of labels you could create. To create a new label, just type it in. You can specify multiple labels per task by separating them with a comma.

Calculating & viewing the schedule

Once you've entered in your tasks, you can click the "Calculate" button in the upper right hand corner. This will cause Agile Agenda to use the information you have entered to calculate the start and end dates of all of your tasks. Once you've done that, you can click the "View Schedule" button in the left side toolbar to see your schedule laid out graphically.

You can filter your schedule by resource, milestone, or label by clicking on the other options in the left side toolbar.