Better Project Management with Team Foundation Server

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.