In a recent discussion over on the AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com Blog, I raised my concerns about the mind boggling need for expert MS Project skills in Agile/Scrum job postings. Laszlo Szalvay’s response was an enlightening one:

I think of the top 3 agile tools on the market (v1, scrumworks and rally) only ScrumWorks does not have a MS Project integration – namely because we don’t understand where the touch points would be…

So why are we still tethered to MS Project?

Here’s an exercise to help determine whether MS Project is truly being of value to you in your Agile project:

  1. Open your MS Project plan for a release that is already in progress.
  2. Identify the date in which you can deploy, to Production, working software.

I’ve yet to see a valid example of how true Agile/Scrum fits into MS Project. I realize there are MSF templates, and people cram it in there by either ignoring 99% of MS Project features or tasking “Development Resources” at 500%, but how is this helpful?

Does anyone have real world Agile implementations in which MS Project has provided value?

Tags: , , , , , ,