- Achieving Business Alignment with Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Agile Planning Templates in Visual Studio Team System 2010
- Enterprise Project Management with Visual Studio Team System 2010 
- Requirements Management and Traceability with Visual Studio Team System 2010

In one of the video (third video in the list above), I talk about how Project Server and Team Foundation Server will work together to provide a complete work managment solution for app dev projects. The integrated solution spans all roles in organization - the business decision makers (CxOs), the project management office, the project managers, the dev managers, the development team - by automating data transfer between Project Server and Team Foundation server.

Tomorrow's meeting is in building 41. Juan Perez from Personify Design is going to talk about TFS integration with Outlook and Word. The session abstract is posted on the user group site, which is https://seattleteamsystem.org/default.aspx.

This is great news for folks building and hosting their web applications. Core value propositions I see are

• Reduced complexity - maintaining a database instance has its own costs. The DB maintenance complexity pretty much vanishes when the data base is available as a service
• low cost of acquisition and pay what what you use- this is a no brainier. You don't have to acquire a server, the server licence, client licenses etc. Just pay based on your resource usage. For small application, up and coming web sites, this flexibility can make a bit difference.
• ubiquitous access - your data is available in the cloud - securely. Access it from your web app, your mobile app, behind a firewall, from wherever.
• a strong programming model - access the data using standard web protocols (SOAP, REST), a managed client library providing LINQ support.

The SSDS site has a link for registering for the free beta program. I don't know when the beta program starts (I got put on a waiting list), but I can't wait :). Meanwhile here's a link to a MIX '08 session on SSDS - https://sessions.visitmix.com/?selectedSearch=BT05 (search for "Introducing SQL Server Data Services").

- Ameya Bhatawdekar

My answer is that it is usually not an Either-Or proposition. The two solutions are complementary.

Project Server, or more accurately the Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solution, addresses the following business imperatives:

• Portfolio Management: Portfolio management is all about managing a group of projects. Portfolios facilitate managing budgets, resources, timelines, dependencies, business alignment, governance etc for a group of projects in a meaningful way. Portfolios also server as a useful tool for modeling the impact of incoming work; "How does this new project affect my other projects? Do I have capacity to take on this new work? What other project can I put on hold/divert resources from etc?". Project Server integrates with Portfolio Server for advanced portfolio management.
• Project Management: And here I really mean two levels of project management. The first level is managing the entire project lifecycle: managing the project through the various phases - inception, planning, execution and closing/transitioning. Some of the major activities that happen at this level of project management are building the project charter/vision, budgeting and funding, staffing, identifying measurement metrics (metrics that will quantify the project performance in each phase, across the entire lifecycle), planning the phases of the projects, identifying the work packages/deliverables, identifying the key milestones and communications. In my observation, this type of project management doesn't require very detailed project plans (with tasks, assignments fleshed out to a very granular level - say at the 8 hour, FTE unit level) - it is really all about establishing the framework for the detailed planning, execution and delivery management. This level of project management is all about developing the project plan for the business decision makers - the CxOs, the VPs, the GMs etc. Too much detail at this level is usually noise and can be counter productive. This type of project management is best carried out in the EPM world. As far as methodologies go -  IMO, they are pretty similar in principle - MSF-CMMI, Traditional Waterfall, PMBOK, Prince2 etc.  The second level of project management is the more tactical, on-the-ground type of project management. This is part where the work is fleshed out to a very granular level - to the level where the folks who do the work have a very clear idea of what they need to work on. when it needs to be worked on, what the dependencies are, what the constraints are etc. Project Managers have to take a frequent stock of the status and make frequent minor adjustments and occasionally major adjustments to ensure that progress is made. Now, in most IT organizations, the two types of project management activities are carried out by different people - the former by project managers from the PMO and the latter by project managers that are embedded with the development team - sometimes, rather most of times, this is the development manager/lead; but, it is not unusual to have the same project manager wear the two hats - that of a PMO or an Enterprise Project Manager and that of a Team Project Manager/Development Manager. 
• Resource Management: Project Server has the knowledge of all the work going on the organization and all the resources who do that work. Project Server has the authoritative resource capacity/demand information. So, Project Server is a great project staffing, cross project resource loading tool.  A cool new feature in Project Server 2007 is the ability to allocate a resource's time to a project without having to do actual assignments. This feature is called "Resource Plans" - IMO, this is a pretty powerful and a long sought after feature. This makes is very easy for PMOs/resource managers to allocate resources to a project without have to work through all the resource assignment details or creating dummy assignments to decrement the resource's availability.
• Time Management: Project Server has a pretty good time-sheet solution. Team members can record time against planned work, unplanned work, project work, non project work at varying levels of granularity - from the individual task level to the project level.
• Tracking all the work in the organization. Project Server allows organizations to track ALL work in the organization. Not just development project, but on-going maintenance work, non development projects, non IT projects etc.

The net is that Project Server is a great work management solution for managing all the work in an organization. It is a great decision support system for the project stakeholders, the business decision makers, the PMO, the resource managers etc.

Now TFS. TFS is the development team's hub. This where the team lives day in and day out. TFS is a very flexible and a powerful change management system where the development team can track work, issues, risks, requirements. The change management system has deep integration with the test and the source code controls system as well and is hosted in the integrated development environment. This is great because it makes the developers very productive. All the tools they need are integrated and available in one place. TFS is where the day to day working of the team is managed.

So, the core TFS modules are

• Work item tracking system (change management system): Users can manage their work artifacts (requirements, tasks, bugs, issues, any custom artifact that they choose to define) in the work item tracking system. Work items can be associated with test results and check-ins providing greater traceability.  In addition, TFS has a policy feature that allows organizations to define working policies such as "every check in must be associated with a work item". This is pretty powerful. The WIT system UI is seamlessly integrated with the development environment. The work items can also be worked on with other tools such as Excel and Project (the WIT system has a public OM - so third party apps can easily integrate with the WIT system and provide a new management surface for the work items)
• Source Code Control System: An industrial strength source code control system. The central code repository and code management system for the entire team. Again, the source code control UI is seamlessly integrated with the development tools.
• Build Management - Team Foundation Server has a great build management feature set that allows teams to define build configurations, define build schedules, manage build assets (machines where the build will be performed) etc. The build systems uses the MS Build platform. Again, the build system UI is integrated with the development environment.
• Test Automation- VSTS has test automation capabilities. Test results are stored in TFS. Test results can be associated with a build ("test X ran successfully for build 12.0.1.1") or a specific run. Test results can also be associated with work items ("test X ran successfully for bug # 123").
• Reporting system - and finally the reporting system. All the data generated and used by the development team is in TFS. TFS provides a sophisticated data warehouse for analyzing this data. The warehouse stores not just current data, but also historical data. This enables teams to view trend information, do forecasting etc. The reports enable teams to identify areas of concern, issues in a timely fashion and react appropriately. The reporting system is a TFS cornerstone feature.

Now, the WIT system can be used for doing tactical project management, but it doesn't provide support resource management, schedule management for a portfolio of projects. TFS has no notion of a resource's overall capacity. If a resource, who is already working on tasks in a different project, is allocated work in a project, no red flags are raised. Project Server has strong resource management capabilities. Resource utilization can be managed across multiple projects. There are checks and bounds in place to prevent resource over allocations. Schedules can be managed across multiple projects - CP links (cross project links) and Deliverables/Dependencies provide a great way to manage cross project scheduling and other dependencies.

TFS doesn't really manage the fiscal aspects of the project; Project Server on the other hand has strong support for fiscal data management (resource cost rate tables, budget resources, cost resource).

One more difference that I'd like to highlight is the fact that development projects are typically executed in TFS; ongoing maintenance work is executed in other system. Anecdotally, development work accounts for less than half of the IT budget. Project Server can track all the work across the organization; app dev projects as well as maintenance work.

It makes great sense for both of these systems to work together in a complementary fashion. TFS is the execution platform and PS is the enterprise planning platform. TFS is well suited for a dev team's needs; PS is a great decision support system for the business decision makers, the PMO etc.

I drew this diagram a couple of years ago - when I was trying out the early smart art feature in PowerPoint 07 when it was still in Beta - and I think it still makes sense:

While we work on providing this functionality out of the box, there are a couple of options available currently for connecting the two systems . The PS-TFS connector solution has been mentioned on this and other blogs before. The source code and documentation is available right now. The other one is the ProjectParty solution from OranTech.

1. Select a folder - any folder. In this case, I have selected one of the start menu folders.

2. Drag and drop the folder to the desktop's edge

3. A new taskbar should appear where you dragged and dropped the folder.

4. Right click on the new taskbar and customize it; add new tool bars - the same ones that are available to add on the main taskbar

Pretty nice eh. I have mine set up to show the address bar, quick links, links, a couple of folders on my HDD, a couple of SharePoint folders that I regularly access (instead of typing in the http url of the sharepoint folder, type it in as a file path; for e.g. if you want to add https://sharepoint/sites/site1/folder1, type in \\sharepoint\sites\site1\folder1). My main task bar only shows the running apps now; I use the new taskbar for general navigation, launching apps etc.

This demo shows building TFS reports in Excel that go against the TFSWarehouse Cube. Excel 2007 had some great features that make building such reports a breeze. Advanced formatting/charting/pivoting capabilities, cubeset functions (not demoed) make Excel a very powerful BI tool.

Excel Services makes it very easy to share these reports with a wider audience. Data connection management, security, dashboards, KPIs make Excel Services a very powerful BI platform.

Here's the demo, hope you find it helpful.

I did a couple of report-building demos during the talk. Here's one of them:

This week I met the team from OranTech and saw a demo of their ProjectParty solution. ProjectParty connects Project Server 2007 and with Team Foundation Server 2005.  It synchronizes meta-data (fields, enumerations) and data (tasks, assignments, resources) between the two system. The solution supports

• many to many Project Server to Team Foundation Server mapping
• many to many Enterprise Project (Project Server) to Team Project (Team Foundation Server) mapping
• many to many task/assignment to work item mapping
• Enterprise custom field to Work Item Field mapping with support for transformation function
• Resource mapping - with support for mapping non AD Project Server uses (like generic users) to named AD users in  TFS
• workflow for reviewing incoming updates from TFS into Project Server
• hierarchical work item structure. This is implemented via a custom TFS control.

In my opinion, the key scenarios enabled by this solution are:

• Top down planning - high level planning can start in Project Server with the details being gradually fleshed out in both Project Server and Team Foundation Server. Typically most of the fine grained project details will be created and managed in Team Foundation Server.
• Bottom up reporting - team members continue to work in VSTS, updating their tasks. Those updates are easily incorporated by the project manager into the enterprise project plan being maintained on the server. The PM can review the impact of the updates on the project plan prior to incorporating them into their project plan.
• Planning with generic resources - PMs can plan the project using generic or team resources; the generic and team PS resources are mapped to named TFS AD users. The tasks assigned to the generic resources result in work items being assigned to the corresponding named TFS resources. The work items can be further broken down into more fine grained work items - establishing a work break down structure. The "wbs" support is implemented using the TFS links and a custom control.

I think ProjectParty is a great solution option, in addition to the CodePlex connector,  for customers who want to connect Project Server and Team Foundation Server now.