Artifact: Work Order
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The work order is the Project Manager's means of communicating what is to be done and when, to the responsible staff. It becomes an internal contract between the Project Manager and those assigned responsibility for completion. |
| Worker: | Project Manager |
| Input to Activities: | Output from Activities: |
Purpose 
At the completion of iteration planning, or whenever a change is needed, the Project Manager uses the work order to turn planning into action. The work order is a negotiated agreement between Project Manager and staff to perform a particular activity or set of activities, with certain deliverables, under defined schedule, effort and resource constraints.
Brief Outline
1. Identification
Uniquely identifies the project and the work order.
2. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) identification.
Identifies the work package (in the project plan) associated with this work order. Effort expended on this work order will be allocated to this work package for tracking.
3. Responsibility
Organizational position(s) responsible for fulfilling the work order.
4. Associated Change Requests
References to Change Requests that are associated with this work order (those that were the stimulus for it or those that will be fixed coincidentally).
5. Schedule
Estimated start date, estimated completion date. Critical path completion date.
6. Effort and other resources
Staff-hours, total and over time. Other resource budgets (e.g. development environment time, test environment time).
7. Description of work and expected outputs.
Describes what is to be done and what is to be produced - references the Rational Unified Process description (of the activities to be performed and artifacts to be produced) or the development case as appropriate.
8. Indication of agreement between Project Manager and responsible staff.
The work order should be signed and dated by the holder of the responsible position (usually a team lead) and the Project Manager.
Timing
Work orders may be issued at any time the Project Manager needs to initiate work on the project. In the main this will occur at the start of an iteration (after iteration planning) and whenever an approved Change Request is passed to the Project Manager for action. The Project Manager may also use the work order to initiate problem/issue resolution work for which no Change Request is required (because it falls within the discretionary authority of the Project Manager).
Responsibility
The Worker: Project Manager is responsible for the work order.
Tailoring
The Work Order is the mechanism by which the Project Manager communicates
plans to project members. On small projects this could be as simple as
discussing a plan on a whiteboard and then confirming agreements through e-mail.
On large, very structured projects, perhaps some form of automated activity
management is used, where the Project Manager injects formal directions which
appear to the team members in to-do lists (maybe with some protocol for
agreement).
