Better Project Management with Team Foundation Server

Posted By: Brian Keller | Mar 20th @ 11:29 AM

Reader's of Brian Harry's blog will be familiar with the "dogfooding statistics" he posts related to how we use Team Foundation Server at Microsoft. Brian has blogged about our deployment topology, the number of teams using TFS, the sheer scale of the number of work items and check-ins, and so on.

But a question which frequently comes up is related to how Microsoft uses Team Foundation Server to really drive business decisions. How do you know if you're on schedule? When will a feature be "done"? Where might additional resources be required? What are the latest roadblocks being faced across your teams? Answering these questions across a team of even ten people can be a challenge, let alone the hundreds or even thousands of people who work on products of "Microsoft scale."

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Jeff Beehler who is the "Chief of Staff" for Visual Studio Team System. In addition to having a really cool title, Jeff is responsible for overall coordination of the teams who build Visual Studio Team System. Jeff has spent his career at Microsoft inventing better processes for managing large software projects, and he shared with us some of the ways he relies on Team Foundation Server every day to help him make project management decisions.

Tags: Team Foundation Server, VSTS

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RicardoClerigo

Please do more videos like this !

Loved it !

opticalmess

Good project management demo... keep theses types of demo's coming!

Bebo
The Misty Dog

Excellent! I'd would love to see more videos on the "how" of using TFS to manage projects.

Question: what project template was used?

I'd like to know what project templates are used internal to Microsoft and which ones are used more often. I'd also like to know how many internal projects actually use one of the built-in project templates that come with TFS.

Keep up the good work!

ymasuda_
ymasuda_

Discovering richness of project analysis functions in reference to Visual Studio team management interfaces. Office System shall differentiate effectiveness of visual impact on analysis views too, and then I have interests to where Server capability provides to managing team human interfaces. Not being Microsoft Project Server, and commonplace of project management arives at VS IDE.

What to do for better project management with VS Server capability? Century of industrial engineering tells demanding business management solution is yet to meet management factor of engineering business. More work activity tracking, time to resource management and auditing check method are implicit requirements of major industrial portions. What about workflow management as part of team management with Server?