An straetegy to easily add new tasks to a big project

The authors of Managing the unmanageable came to visit our office and they gave us insights to improve our processes as well as some methods to organize projects. Something that is very interesting about the book, is that it contains valuable and innovative information about managing software projects, and in my opinion the strategies and recommendations can be applied to lots of projects, even if they are not related to software. The one that I'm about to talk about is -I believe- designed for big projects. So let's start talking about the context, so you can find why doing this will be useful and probably the ideas that brought this method into something real.

When you're getting started with a big project, you'll create a first list of tasks that will be developed, from this list, there will come more and more tasks as the project gets developed, so, figuring out how much effort is required for each task can take a lot of time if you don't have anything that leverage the way that this happens, so I'll present you with the steps required for this strategy:

• Divide the project in tasks
• Assign each task a number that represents how difficult the task is
• Sort the tasks

Once that the tasks are sorted, as you can probably imagine, it's very easy to keep the list sorted when more tasks area added to the project, and to estimate the effort required for them,  you just need to compare them with a similar task. This are some of the advantages that you can find when you use this method:

• Adding new tasks is easy, you can compare similar tasks and make a good bet on how much effort it's required for the task and where in the level of effort required does this task falls into place
• You can give a more accurate delivery date for the project, because it's more easy to develop
• Adding big pieces to the project should take less time to organize and make the estimates