On July 14, 2015 at 1:00 PM EDT, QSM's Laura Zuber presented What's New in SLIM-Suite 9.0.

A foundation of the SLIM philosophy is to know what your team is capable of producing and never promise to deliver more than those finite limits. Leveraging a history of completed project core metrics enables you to quantify your capabilities, and not only provide a defensible basis of estimation, but support statistical analysis for project benchmarking and identifying performance improvement opportunities.

QSM's newest release of SLIM-Suite, version 9.0, provides a number of enhancements to simplify and organize completed project data in SLIM-DataManager and manage data sets definitions and queries in SLIM-Metrics. In this webinar, Laura Zuber will demonstrate key new features of both products. You will see how providing project size details, master keyword lists, multiple view layouts, and multi-select variable analysis equip you to expand your historical project repository and increase its use.

Laura Zuber has 20 years of experience in software development consulting and training. She has conducted training and demonstrations for all QSM SLIM Suite Tools and assisted with QSM Support. Laura has managed software development projects, served as a senior software process improvement specialist, performed process assessments, designed and implemented best practices, and co-lead corporate metrics training program.

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Extension menu items are one of the best new features in SLIM-Suite 8.2.  You don’t have to be a programmer (or even pretend to be one online) to create customizable menu items that perform tasks like these right from the menu of any SLIM-Suite application:

• Call external applications like Excel, Word, or PowerPoint
• Run SLIM-Suite utilities or APIs
• Open external references or process guides
• Launch the Windows Snipping Tool to capture screen settings or data and email them to your team.

Once you get the hang of it, creating your own custom menu items is easy: if you can unzip files and use Notepad, trust me – you can do this!

The Extension Menu Item feature is documented in its own chapter in each SLIM-Suite user guide, but if you’re like me you could probably use a few real life examples and some sample configuration settings to jump start the process.  In a fairly short period of time, I was easily able to create the following menu items in SLIM-DataManager:

• IMPORT PROJECT FROM SPREADSHEET
• EXPORT DATABASE TO SPREADSHEET
• RUN DATAMANAGER API
• Bring up the API documentation
• Bring up an internal data validation guide
• Launch Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote
• Launch the Windows Snipping tool.

The menu items I created fell into several categories: launching an external application, launching a SLIM-Suite utility/API, pointing to an external process guide, launching a Windows utility. I’ll cover each one, providing sample configuration text for each.

CREATING THE .INI FILE

QSM is pleased to announce the release of SLIM Suite 8.2, which, for the first time, provides the ability to perform enhanced top-down estimation for capacity planning. Unlike other resource demand management tools that rely on bottom-up estimates, QSM is the first in the industry to provide detailed resource breakdowns, utilizing a more accurate top-down approach. Top-down estimation accounts for even the unpredictable aspects of IT project implementation that a bottom-up approach does not, such as unrealistic project goals, miscommunication among team members and rework, which may account for up to 60% of the total effort on a project. With this information, project managers can more confidently choose the project team and assign the detailed tasks to the team at hand, improving accuracy for planning and executing successful IT projects while fully utilizing existing resources for individual projects, as well as longer term resource capacity planning. New APIs for this resource information allow organizations to integrate SLIM with the enterprise resource management (PPM) tools that they are currently using. 

In addition to top-down resource demand, other new features introduced with the 8.2 release include:

As more of our clients adopt Agile methods, they often wonder how SLIM-Estimate fits into the Agile planning process? It’s not uncommon for teams to claim that Agile makes estimation obsolete. But regardless of which features end up in a particular release, businesses still need to know how much functionality can be delivered within a given schedule and budget. Because I have been working with more customers to estimate Agile projects, the first Agile planning and analysis practice suggested by Ellen Gottesdiener & Mary Gorman got my attention ‒ Use Three Planning Horizons: Now-View, Pre-View, and Big-View. Simply stated, each level of the view hierarchy represents more fine-grained planning and analysis:

• Big-View – general idea; how the product will fit in with other products
• Pre-View – enough detail to start planning the next release
• Now-View – delivery team analyzes and estimate activities needed

Their statement, "we don’t think of agile as a methodology per se. Rather, it’s a disciplined discovery and delivery framework (emphasis added)" is consistent with QSM's approach to estimating Agile projects. Macro estimation techniques allow the business to allocate resources to product development efforts by identifying the number of releases to be built during the next budget cycle, which corresponds to the Big-View horizon. More detailed release planning is performed later in the process, using the prioritized product backlog to determine delivery goals for each iteration.

SLIM Suite default workbooks contain pre-defined views you can customize to fit your reporting needs.  The Navigation Panel on the left side of the user interface displays the list of views, organized into sections or folders.  Each SLIM tool contains multiple views to facilitate presentation and analysis of the unique metrics it employs.

Figure 1: Navigation Panel

One of the most valuable and flexible objects to include in a view is the Note Panel.  Just as it sounds, it is simply a note pad where you can include descriptive text about estimation assumptions, findings, questions, instructions to SLIM users.... the possibilities are numerous.  QSM uses the Note Panel to provide instructions, tips, and easily customizable project and executive summary reports.  The view below shows the Section Purpose & Operating Procedures view, which describes other views in the folder, along with suggestions for tailoring subsequent charts and reports. 

Figure 2: Note Panel View

You can use notes to document the estimation procedure you want others in your organization to follow.  Use notes to document the special background information that explains why the recommended solution meets the most important project goals and constraints.

On April 12, 2012 at 1:00 PM EDT, QSM will host a webinar focused on two successful implementations of the SLIM API presented by IBM's Carl Engel, State Street's Scott Lancaster, and QSM's Larry Putnam, Jr. 

How do best in class development organizations achieve maximum return on investment from their estimation programs? By leveraging the SLIM API for integrations between estimation tools and detail-oriented products, development teams are able to simplify estimation processes and broaden the estimation program user base. Presented by Carl Engel of IBM Global Services, Scott Lancaster of State Street, and Larry Putnam, Jr. of QSM, this webinar explores two successful implementations of the SLIM API between third party tools and the SLIM Suite. 

Carl Engel is the Estimating Program Manager for IBM's Global Business Services responsible for the development and deployment of performance benchmarking and estimating process, methods and tools including the support for nearly 1,000 SLIM Suite users. Carl has been with IBM for 12 years as an Associate Partner and has had previous roles as the program manager for IBM's project management methodology and tools. He is an IBM certified Executive Project Manager, PMP with over 30 years of program and project management experience primarily in very large scale efforts in the nuclear industry and U.S. National Laboratories.