Patent ID: 7559049

Claim:
A computer implemented method for scheduling resources to be used in a software development project comprising: a planning department receiving information from a customer regarding a software development project to be completed through define, discover, design, develop, and deploy phases, the software development project is one of a plurality of software development projects bundled in a release, wherein the release has a predefined resource capacity; the planning department initially reviewing the received information and providing initial feedback in the define phase prior to completing a detailed requirements analysis in the discover phase, wherein the discover phase is in support of business requirements which are documented in a centralized repository and enable traceability and reuse in subsequent projects, and wherein the detailed requirements analysis includes a plurality of steps including one or more of functional requirements modeling, system requirements modeling, and application integration modeling; the planning department reserving resources for the software development project from the predefined resource capacity for the release via a software tool that uses past experience and the information received from the customer as input and produces an estimate of resources required for the software development project as output prior to completing the detailed requirements analysis, wherein reserving resources reduces availability of the predefined resource capacity in the release for subsequent software development projects; the planning department confirming the reserved resources at each of the plurality of steps in the detailed requirements analysis; the planning department offering the customer a final contract upon completion of the plurality of steps of the detailed requirement analysis, wherein the final contract describes the resources to be used for completion of the project; and the planning department storing a list of the reserved resources on a computer readable medium.