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 […]
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 […]
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?
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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.
Confusion: interface design’s enemy
Interface design is an intriguing and widely diverse world. There are as many ways to make a text box as there are designers on the planet.
I like getting to a site and seeing a new, original way to design a web site's navigation. However, I cannot stand interfaces that confuse me.
Here are the two most confusing types:
- There are so many buttons, links, and other gizmos trying to grab my attention that I cannot choose where I should go next.
- The design metaphor is so obscure I can't even find where to click next.
Those pages feel like no one outside the design team saw them before they were published. It's as if the design team spent so much time tweaking and refining their work, they lost sight of the reason for the page's existence.
That doesn't mean a web page or system interface can't have a lot going on. It must be clear what's the next step. When on gets to AceProject's web page, they see this:
There are a lot of […]
Fix it right the first time
My washing machine has died on me. It's only when these things failed that we realize how much use we get out of them. I know, I know, it's cliché. Try to tell that to my growing mountain of laundry…
Luckily, I had purchased an extended warranty plan, so fixing the thing won't cost me money. So after calling the repair company, waiting two days for a callback, then waiting another day for the technician to show up, I am hoping he will be able to fix my ailing washing machine in one visit.
How naive of me.
It's now been 2 weeks, 2 visits from technicians, and a couple visits to the laundromat. I still don't have a working washing machine. There's always a new part that needs to be replaced.
Nobody will be surprised that I am getting impatient here. I keep wondering why the technician didn't thoroughly inspect my washing machine and made sure he found all the broken parts.
The reason is simple: the shorter […]
The freshness of the first look
Working on the same project for a long time makes you too focused on the details and disconnected from the big picture.
That's why it's so refreshing to have new people join the team. We have someone new at customer service, Michel. He's Micheld in the forums.
When Michel started using AceProject, he got excited at things that we took for granted. It made us realize that we had been focusing on what needed improvement in AceProject, and we didn't notice what worked really well. For example, Michel was impressed with the access rights flexibility when assigning a user to a project.
New people on a project will give the team a new perspective, that's not tainted by time. If only for the inspiring effect, it's worth exchanging project team members every once in a while – think of it as a cultural exchange. The developer from product A goes to work on the product B project, and vice versa. The new team member may be able to solve a problem that […]