Developing a SOW for ACME Books- The Statement of Work (SOW) provides a starting point for any project. A general SOW can be developed through interviews with a perspective client. This can then be highly specialized as the needs of the client and the technologies available to meet these needs are further defined.
| Acme Books is a hypothetical nation-wide book distributor. Acme Books wants to investigate the possibility of doing direct-marketing sales to potential customers via the Internet. To this end, Acme Books wishes to utilize the Internet as an advertising tool and to make its inventory available on the Internet for potential customers to browse. Additionally, Acme Books would like to provide a form to obtain customer profile information (perhaps to send out a mail-order catalog). You have been asked to direct the development of this web site. |
Figure 0.2.1: Initial Description of ACME
For example, a preliminary SOW, shown in Figure 0.2.2, can be developed from the initial description of needs provided for ACME Books, which is shown in Figure 0.2.1. This SOW should be expanded in throughout the modules as more is learned about the technology available to meet needs.
| The ACME Book project will thrust ACME Books into the forefront of technology by presenting their business methodologies in an online, internet-available format. |
Figure 0.2.2: Initial Statement of Work
Developing a Set of Tasks and a Baseline Schedule- Now that you have a preliminary SOW, a team should be established who will meet the needs identified in the statement. Part of the baseline schedule is developing the team and the overhead associated with getting organized. By utilizing team management tools such as Microsoft Project and TeamManager, a team's efforts can be more efficiently coordinated.
To establish a schedule, a team should split the SOW into tasks which may need to be broken down further. At this point, the SOW may need to be expanded to meet more customer needs. For example, the above SOW states that ACME will have some sort of online, internet-ready format. The team would identify this task and decide upon the best technology and resources needed to approach it.
An example set of baseline tasks and schedules is shown in Figure 0.2.3. This information will then be tracked through TeamManager and Project, as demonstrated below.
| Task |
Estimated Length to Completion (hours) |
| Develop a SOW |
1 |
| Create Team |
.5 |
| Break Apart SOW into Tasks |
.5 |
| Create Tasks in TeamManager and allocate team resources |
1 |
| Create Separate Projects in MS Project for major tasks |
2 |
|
Figure 0.2.3: Baseline Tasks and Timeline
Organizing the Team Effort with Microsoft Team Manager- TeamManager can be used to organize team dynamics such as people tracking and task allocation. After a team leader has been chosen, TeamManager will need to be initialized and team information entered.
A tutorial is supplied with TeamManager for this purpose. To access the tutorial, select Help -> Quick Tutorials from the menu. For practice with TeamManager, you may wish to use the sample data shown here. (This file, sample.mtp, is shipped with TeamManager and is also available for download in the required files section of this site.) Figure 0.2.4 demonstrates the Profile Information which is kept for each team member. By clicking on the Add People button, additional team members may be entered into the overall team profile.
 |
Figure 0.2.4: Profile Information
Once the team has been established, tasks should be entered. By choosing the Tasks tab on the left-hand side of the open TeamManager window, the view shown in Figure 0.2.5 will appear. To add a new tasks, select Insert -> Tasks from the menu.
 |
Figure 0.2.5: Task Organizer
Utilize Microsoft Project to Control the Tasks and Schedule- Once you have established tasks in TeamManager, you will want to use these generalized tasks as a starting point for separate projects. If a task is very large and can be easily broken down into many separate smaller tasks, it should be assigned its own project to make it more manageable. For example, if the task from the SOW was to create an intranet, this would need to be a new project in MS Project.
To create a new project from within Microsoft Project, select File -> New from the menu. Once you have created a project, you may enter tasks and allocate resources. These tasks can be viewed in a calendar format similar to Figure 0.2.6, or in the form of a Gantt Chart or PERT chart.
 |
Figure 0.2.6: MS Project Calendar View
