Scoutwest eats it own dog food!

"Want to put me to sleep?  Show me a story about how company X used product Y to solve problem Z." - Tom Yager, InfoWorld.  Far more interesting is a story of how a company uses it's own products in it's every day business.  This is a such a story.

Scoutwest produces two products Standard Time® and Standard Issue®.  Since these products help companies with project management and developing products, it seems natural that Scoutwest should use them too.  It's called "eating your own dog food", and we do it.  Here's how.

All product features start out in Standard Issue (SI).  SI is a nice place to keep track of customer enhancement requests and bugs.  We handle a lot of customer interaction, and some of that is requests for new features.  Customers have a lot of good ideas and we usually listen to what they say.  SI keeps everything.  We assign issues to a project and subsystem, give the issue a priority, and always enter the amount of time we think the issue will take.  This allows us to easily plan new releases.  We can shuffle features around when deciding which ones to include in a release.  Our releases are usually small and rapidly implemented.  The version field really helps here too.  Using the version report, we can see how much time will be taken up for each release.

Sometimes the features we plan to implement are large, and require additional research and planning.  Standard Time (ST) is used for such planning.  It is helpful to break a project down into small tasks that have more accurate duration estimates.  We almost always make a project hierarchy using subsystems and project tasks.  This makes the feature easier to visualize and manage.  It also means that we can see duration rollups for each part of the feature, and for the entire feature.  Each feature we work on is represented by a project in ST, and the individual tasks act as to-do lists.

Once we have a project plan in ST it is a simple matter to execute on the plan, tracking time as we go.  We don't always track time for every task we work on because it's hard to work on ST while using it at the same time.  Project plans save us time because they cause us to think about the work to be performed.  The act of writing tasks down forces you to consider how they will be implemented.  This usually causes you to remember several other things that need to be done, and new ways to do them.  Usually requirements documents are written using Word that describe the new feature we are considering.  The outline for documents is taken directly from the project plan.  Again, the act of writing down detailed plans based on upon task line items is a mental exercise that brings out more understanding.  It takes time, but usually results in a better design and implementation.

SI and ST are key ingredients to our product development approach.  The products are simple and meet our own needs for project management.

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