Currently I'm working in an organization where we are in the "discovery and prep" stage of Transportation management system. I have been asked to recommend a team of IT people for this stage. What is the composition and number of people needed for this technology org?
The team size is a function of the scope and complexity of scope, and it is attenuated by the skills of the team and their maturity in working together. You also have to consider whether the work will be supported by services. For example, will the development or project team have to perform negotiation and contracting with 3PLs, or is that handled by another department?
So the first step to figuring how many people is a figuring out the size of the project scope. If you are working with an ERP like SAP or even using SAP TMS, SAP provides a good project estimator tool, but other vendors have similar guidance methods.
If you are developing from scratch and have a new team and will building from a "green field" with a new team and your first product is a standalone TMS, then that's a whole different topic, but given that you are inquiring about a TMS I should assume you are implementing a new software module onto an existing blueprint, be it SAP, Oracle or another flavour.
Sizing the effort can include counting processes, users, forms/screens, databases/objects, interfaces, custom programs. If you are developing in Agile, then you are going to have a small team and you will estimate based on user stories and from the relative experience of the team.
Can you provide a bit more insight into the size of this project in easily countable objects that we can relate to? (users, inventory value, number of shipments, number of warehouses, etc.).
Otherwise as a general guidance, and based on SAP TMS, its about 500 person days with a team of six, excluding QA, network infrastructure, DBA and business users part of the project.
The team size is a function of the scope and complexity of scope, and it is attenuated by the skills of the team and their maturity in working together. You also have to consider whether the work will be supported by services. For example, will the development or project team have to perform negotiation and contracting with 3PLs, or is that handled by another department?
So the first step to figuring how many people is a figuring out the size of the project scope.
If you are working with an ERP like SAP or even using SAP TMS, SAP provides a good project estimator tool, but other vendors have similar guidance methods.
If you are developing from scratch and have a new team and will building from a "green field" with a new team and your first product is a standalone TMS, then that's a whole different topic, but given that you are inquiring about a TMS I should assume you are implementing a new software module onto an existing blueprint, be it SAP, Oracle or another flavour.
Sizing the effort can include counting processes, users, forms/screens, databases/objects, interfaces, custom programs. If you are developing in Agile, then you are going to have a small team and you will estimate based on user stories and from the relative experience of the team.
Can you provide a bit more insight into the size of this project in easily countable objects that we can relate to? (users, inventory value, number of shipments, number of warehouses, etc.).
Otherwise as a general guidance, and based on SAP TMS, its about 500 person days with a team of six, excluding QA, network infrastructure, DBA and business users part of the project.