Meeting Milestones via Swarming and Reserves - Basil Vandegriend

Swarming

• The basic idea behind swarming is to throw extra people at the outstanding work necessary to meet the milestone. In project management terms this typically involves sacrificing effort (budget) to save time (schedule).
• to swarming effectively. The first is to focus on the critical path
• typically accomplished by pulling people off of non-critical-path activities
• second guideline is similar: focus on work necessary for completing the milestone instead of non-milestone-related work.
• This may seem obvious, but in practice it is surprising how people will tend to choose the more interesting tasks over more tedious but necessary tasks
• One way of achieving this focus is to clearly define what is part of the milestone versus what is not.
• One team I know uses a task board with post-it notes colored by release to visualize this.

Reserves

• hold back a portion of some type of resource so that it is available if an unforeseen situation arises - usually a problem, or sometimes an opportunity.
• set aside a period of time in the schedule as contingency
• may be an extra iteration per release
• or simply extending the original estimated schedule by a certain percentage.
• more advanced version of this approach is to ensure that each person is not normally 100% busy,

http://www.basilv.com/psd/blog/2012/meeting-milestones-via-swarming-and-reserves (page does not exists enymore)