Using Apptivo for managing software projects that use the Waterfall method

This is my first post on the Apptivo blog. I joined Apptivo a few months back and I am responsible for operations and marketing at Apptivo.

Over the next few posts I plan to share my thoughts on how Apptivo can be used as a project management tool for various software development methodologies. This is the first post and it is on managing software development projects that use the traditional waterfall model.

As the Wikipedia indicates the waterfall model has distinct phases – Requirements, Design, Construction, Integration, Testing, Installation or deployment and eventually Maintenance. Typically these project phases tend to be sequential in nature.

For this project let us say that I am already signed on to a new firm in Apptivo. First I go to the Projects App.

I am shown my Project Management welcome page.  Assuming that I am the Project Manager for the project, I first add users to the project.

For now let us say I have Todd who is the designer, Maggy the Business analyst and Bhaskar who is the Development Manager in my firm.

Once I have added the users to my firm, I went  ahead and created my first project.

I also created a customer Acme Inc. for whom the project is being done. And I arrived at the first view of my project dashboard.

The first phase of the project is the Requirements phase.  I  define that as a milestone and I choose ‘Create  New Milestone’. I would like to assign this to Maggy who is the Business Analyst, but she is not assigned to the project yet.  The project app wants me to  add users to the project, and I can do that pretty easily by checking the boxes.

While I have set the milestone, I would like to add tasks that constitute the milestone.  First is the ‘Business meetings’ to understand the requirements.

Subsequently I added two more tasks, ‘Prepare the requirements documents’ and finally ‘Review and sign off the requirements with Acme Inc.’

I then  created a design milestone and assigned it to Todd.  Under this milestone I  created a few more tasks – Create the  design document ,  create the class diagrams and create the data model and  finally review with Bhaskar.  All of these are assigned to Todd.

Now that, I have setup the two initial milestones and now I need to set up the development tasks. I anticipate that the development tasks are going to be several and I do  not know all the tasks involved. So I shall create a sub-project for development instead of a milestone. Bhaskar can be made the project manager for this sub project and he could add additional employees to this project.

I then  added a milestone for the testing phase. Finally I added a task for deployment over the weekend. I  figured that I want this to be a  milestone, so I added  a milestone for ‘Deployment and go live’ and linked the task to it.

To conclude, I reviewed the dates and edited the project dates wherever necessary.

And my project plan is done.

I now have a project setup and can manage the project using  Apptivo.  All of these capabilities are available with the standard plan that is free. So good luck with your project management and if you have thoughts or comments please share them below.