Best PracticesBest Practices

Lesson One

• Correctly identify the proper user.

• Develop and maintain a quality relationship with the user and user groups.

• Create and maintain a platform for communications in order to have a quality relationship with the users.

• Demonstrate results and understand why it is important to do so.

• Educate the users on the project management process and what their roles and responsibilities are within that process.

• Consider user feedback and consensus.

• Identify and recruit an evangelist.

• Show why and how to conduct primary research.

• Show respect for users.

• And focus, focus, focus on real user needs.

Lesson Two

• Have a clear vision for the project that is easily understood.

• Get executive commitment.

• Make fast decision.

• Have a decision pipeline.

• Focus on executive sponsor process education.

• Use measurements. Understand how and why you need to negotiate.

• Have a well-thought-out plan to convince the executive sponsor you are on target and gain his or her support.

• Understand the benefits of a kill switch and why every project should have one.

• Finally, appreciate the merits of celebration – and never take it lightly.

Lesson Three

• Everyone involved must be on the same page in terms of the project’s business objectives.

• Make sure stakeholders can recite the “elevator pitch,” a concise and comprehensible explanation of the business objectives delivered in 10 seconds or less.

• Consider the big picture and how the project fits into the organization’s overall strategy.

• Promote speed and understand how the clarity of business objectives can increase speed.

• Have a yardstick (project measurements).

• Make return on investment (ROI) a clear business objective.

• Collaborate with team members to ensure a clear and concise message on business objectives.

• Build the foundation for a peer review process.

• Do you homework through basic and fundamental research and test the clarity and reliability of the business objectives.

Lesson Four

• Minimize scope to facilitate optimization.

• Understand the merits of stepping-stones and the dangers of milestones.

• Time is the enemy of all projects, so consider time boxing, which involves setting deadlines and a fixed amount of time in which to complete the project or stepping-stones.

• Examine the rules of engagement.

• Manage expectations by minimizing and optimizing the scope.

• Make use of a small medium, like an index card, to help optimize scope.

• Use role models as guides for both good and bad behavior.

• Assess the need of a requirement by its yield or gain.

• Consider the risk of each requirement.

• And finally, consider cost, risk, and gain as elements to optimizing scope. This point came out of an effort at a CHAOS University workshop to create a zoo, which is why it is named Panda Bear.

Lesson Five

• Use an iterative development style – it is the heart and soul of any agile process.

• Collaborate with team members as part of the agile development process.

• Follow up with rapid feedback, which promotes quickness and velocity – cornerstones of agile methods.

• Recognize that the agile process instills better testing and code quality controls that conventional software development.

• Consider the use of a Web-bad standard infrastructure as a key component to the agile style.

• Ponder no new releases.

• This is one of our more controversial subjects, for it knocks down one of the software industry’s biggest profit windmills. Organizations should go to a no-release policy and implement features and functions in a rapid pace on a standard infrastructure.

Lesson Six

• Projects must follow project management fundamentals.

• Keep track of all project management details – project managers need to plan for the changes or functions required to arrive at a goal.

• Project leaders should possess basic project management skills.

• Project managers need leadership qualities to be effective leaders.

• Make and maintain connections, as they are important to the success of a project.

• Promote both an individual and collective sense of ownership among the team – the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with ownership will contribute to the success of a project.

• Recognize that members of a project team are inclined to have a stronger commitment to the team if they feel their participation and contributions are valued.

• Understand the business.

• Be able to pass judgment on issues under consideration and reach a firm decision.

• And finally, experienced project managers increase the odds of success.

Lesson Seven

• Create and maintain accurate estimates and develop a more systematic approach toward project estimating and costing.

• Know that projects are marathons, so prepare for the long run.

• Look at ways to make your project more financially attractive. Consider working with a project budget and understand how companies manage their information technology money.

• Know the elusive financial break-even point and how that point changes as the project moves forward.

• Manage change; failure to do so is almost always a major contributor to project failure.

• Use incentives to finish the project as a way to improve success and reduce failures.

• Don’t be afraid to kill a project and take your lumps and losses.

• Recognize the benefits of pruning or re-factoring your code – cutting our unused or meaningless code.

• And finally, create a functional pipeline.

Lesson Eight

• Examine the matter of competency and what you need to consider in evaluating the competency of your staff and the team.

• Place workers with skills in jobs that will most benefit the project.

• Use incentives as a tool to motivate achievement of project goals or significant stepping-stones.

• Look at team building and keeping the team together.

• Establish staff development and training programs.

• Make use of mentors and mentoring to improve the skills and competency of staff members and the team.

• Consider the role of “chemistry” among team members and how it can affect the project in both positive and negative ways.

• Learn what you can do when the chemistry does not work and you have an exceptionally difficult team member.

Lesson Nine

• A formal methodology must have a problem statement to ensure that everyone is solving the same business problem.

• Establish a formal process for gathering and maintaining requirements.

• Develop a detailed project plan.

• Understand that one missed small detail can cause big problems that could lead to project failure – the “butterfly effect.”

• Consider the use of analogies to improve communication between users and developers. Maintain a formal methodology to support interaction between stakeholders.

• This point includes a case study on how a formal methodology improved the results in hospital intensive care units. Consider the concept of the Project Management Office (PMO).

• Integrate formal peer reviews into your formal process.

• And finally, employ a flexible formal process to improve the success rate.