Other Posts Archives - Page 14 of 21

Intuition laughs in the face of analysis

Project management is all about data: goals, requirements, resources, tasks, documents, planning, scheduling, budgeting, and then some.

No matter how much of that data one can product or study, there is always a time when the decision must be taken with the gut. When we must listen to the voice of intuition.

When, even with all the facts against him, a developer can be convinced he can fix the problem within the deadline.

Can you trust intuition?

Intuition and faith and so much alike. Can we trust somebody's gut feeling, or even our own? Especially when it contradicts the facts?

The fact is, if we don't, chances are we will regret it down the line. When someone is absolutely convinced, and can pass this conviction onto the team, they deserve to be given the chance to prove their gut feeling.

It's a big risk.

But one will never be great by playing it safe.

So the question is: would you prefer greatness or safety?

By Daniel Raymond|2008-09-03T12:37:00-04:002008-09-03|

The cool tools your never used again

We see them all the time on the web: cool tools. Websites that offer a service that is original, technically advanced, or just fun. If you read a lot of blogs, you probably check out at least one of those cool tools every week. How many of those make the move from cool new tool to tools you use regularly?

There are three reasons why you won’t keep using a cool tool:

1. It’s not usable enough
2. It’s not fitted for what you do

Not usable enough: I want Sandy

I wanted to use this service. It’s really cool. It’s an automated assistant that you can email back and forth with, to build lists, keep track of appointments and receive reminders. Somehow I never could master the Sandy’s syntax. I tried a few times, couldn’t get Sandy to do what I wanted, and I gave up.

Not fitted to what I do: Cymbolism

This is another very cool service. You search for a word, like powerful, and cymbolism returns a chart with the colors people […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-27T13:45:00-04:002008-08-27|

Need/Product mismatch?

ESI International published a report, stating “project management and business analysis software tools met or exceeded expectations for only 10.5 percent of respondents.” This means that, according to their survey, nearly 9 out of 10 people are not satisfied with their project management system.

That’s a lot! Is there no satisfaction to be had from project management software? Is there not a project management tool that can do what the market needs?

Wait. What DOES the market need, anyway?

This is where things get tricky. No one needs the same thing in a project management system.

When I do a demonstration for AceProject, before I even start, I ask two questions:

What do you guys do? Tell me about your organization
What are you looking for in a project management tool?

I have yet to receive two identical answers. Of course, there are basic things that come up: time sheets, email reminders, estimates versus actuals, client access, etc. However, every organization is using a slightly different method for project management, every manager is looking for different metrics to assess […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-25T13:44:00-04:002008-08-25|

Making status meetings fun is possible – yes, I promise!

Regular status meetings are boring: everyone
goes around the table and rehashes what they did in the last week or month. No
one really cares. If the project dates are slipping, the team wants the meeting
to be over with so they can get back to doing something useful.

But status meetings can be fun!

Yes, I know, it's a strange concept. But I've
seen it happen. I was doing documentation on a software development team. The
team was implementing agile development practices, and they were planning to do
a release every month. This meant a big meeting with marketing, sales, the
whole development team.

It was important for the project lead to
include the whole company in that project. She felt that it would bring the two
worlds of development and marketing/sales together, that it would help people
understand the other side.

Since everyone had things to do in the
project, I suggested that we make something visual, like a board, to monitor
out progress. The rest of the team thought I was crazy, they humored me. So I
built this huge board and pasted a giant photograph on […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-20T13:44:00-04:002008-08-20|

How to lose a sale, now and forever

At Websystems, we have IP phones that forward our voicemail messages to our email addresses. This is very convenient, since we can forward the message to the appropriate person easily. The voicemail notification also contains any special information entered by the caller, such as confidential or urgent.

Naturally, when I saw a voicemail marked urgent in my inbox, I listened to it right away. It could be a client with a problem that is keeping his team from working.

It wasn’t.

About 20 seconds into the message, I realized the call was not an emergency; it was a sales pitch, for an outsourced sales call service. I immediately stopped listening to the message and deleted it.

My only regret is that I didn’t catch the product’s name. If I had, I would have made sure I never buy that product or any product from that company.

Leaving a fake urgent message to make sure I listen to it is disrespectful. It’s bad salesmanship. While it did get me to listen to the message, it had the opposite effect. It convinced […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-18T13:00:00-04:002008-08-18|

Dates, Dates, Dates

Spore is the computer gaming world’s most anticipated release. Well, it was in 2005, and in 2006, and 2007. It should be released this month. Wired has a nice recap of the release dates’ evolution.

Two whole years late. Spore has been set to release “in a few months” for the last two years. How does that happen? While it’s perfectly understandable to have problems and delays in the development of such a groundbreaking game, I am curious to know what made the game so late. When the creators demoed the game at the E3 conference in late 2005, they expected the game to be finished and ready to ship. And yet, we are almost 3 years later and it has not been released.

Is this a good example of bad project management, or a yet better example that, no matter how well the project is managed, sometimes Murphy weighs heavily in the balance?

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-15T12:39:00-04:002008-08-15|

Can time be managed?

I am presently working on a glossary of terms related to project management. As I was looking for definitions of time management, I found this interesting comment on Wikipedia:

"In a 2001 interview^[2], David Allen observed:

You can't manage time, it just is. So "time management" is a
mislabeled problem, which has little chance of being an effective
approach. What you really manage is your activity during time, and
defining outcomes and physical actions required is the core process
required to manage what you do."

Yet another thing to ponder. Time goes by at a constant speed, regardless of how we feel about or what we are doing.

But what can we do?

Everyone can make the best of their time. In a project, it's important to wonder if those 4-hour meetings are really an efficient use of the team's time (they're not). We shouldn't think about managing our time, but about using our time efficiently.

Is it more efficient to research a problem for several hours on Google or to ask your […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-13T13:42:00-04:002008-08-13|

Failures get more visibility than sucessses

I saw this comic this morning. The text reads: "Do a million things right and no one notices, do one thing wrong and it gets cc'ed all over the office."

Why does failure get more attention than success?

As much as we should learn from our failures, it's also important to learn from our successes. What went right? Why? How can we replicate it in the next projects?

It feels strange to think about successes that way, but knowing the recipe to your success ensures you can succeed consistently.

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-12T11:25:00-04:002008-08-12|

About herding cats

It's hard enough getting clear deliverables
in a project, keeping them that way is just like herding cats.

If the project lasts long enough, you can
bet the deliverables for the project will be modified. Here are 3 common things
that will affect the deliverables:

Adding a feature to the product
Changing requirements
Adding another stakeholder

New features

There are always great ideas to be had,
once everything is decided and the developers are scheduled to the minute. One
can't stifle creativity, and great ideas deserve to be taken into
consideration. However, one must carefully weigh the impact the new feature
will have on three factors:

How much more sales this feature will bring
How much time will the feature take to develop
How the new feature will affect everything else in the product

If the cost of adding the feature (the time
and complexity added to the project) is higher than is impact on revenue, it
would be a good idea to understand better why the feature must be added. Even
more so if the project schedule is already tight and the delivery date cannot
be moved. Unless your team has a […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-08T14:49:00-04:002008-08-08|

Good service pays

Sometimes it's hard to be nice to everyone, all the time.

Some people just don't get along, and it takes a lot of self-control to keep treating them as well as any other customer. In fact, it may even feel downright impossible.

However, these difficult customers can also turn into your best advocates. When demanding people are satisfied with what you offer, they will stick with your product or service for a long time because they know how hard it is to find a company that can perform to their standard of quality.

Over time, we see the benefits of this policy. People change jobs, and they will bring AceProject into their new company. And now all the energy we spent on making the original client happy pays off: the new client is already sold, and we have someone on the inside who can be an advocate for AceProject.

By Daniel Raymond|2008-08-07T14:22:00-04:002008-08-07|