Volume 4, No. 2
“Helping You Accelerate Your High-Tech Development Projects”
Welcome to the ANGOTTI PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT e-mail newsletter!
The goal of this monthly newsletter is to help you accelerate your development projects by sharing many of the tips, techniques, and strategies we’ve honed during two decades of providing high-tech consulting services.
This issue focuses on developing a built-in feedback method that can be carried forward to the next project. This method improves Project Management productivity by creating a process “lessons learned” loop.
THE PROJECT WRAP UP
It’s very important to use knowledge gained in one project to improve upon the next. Post project completion is a good time for managers to improve their management skills and those of the team. This involves focusing on both what worked and what didn’t work. The result introduces learning into the project management process. Here are good areas on which to focus during Lessons-Learned meetings held periodically during and after project completion:
1) Project stress points
2) Estimated versus actuals on time and cost
3) How the “outsourced” or remote teams worked with the core team
4) Team support from the Project Sponsor
PROJECT STRESS POINTS
Every project has some stress points. These can include interpersonal interactions, communications breakdowns, slow responses from team members or managers, misunderstandings, etc. Objectively identifying these, and then considering ways around them, can be very helpful to improve future project effectiveness. Often unintended consequences and communication problems can be uncovered and fixed rather easily.
Two frequently overlooked stress points are relationships with vendors and adding new technology to a project. These can easily go awry, creating severe problems. Introduction of new technology into the project, either hardware or software, requires additional time and can create new problems, not accounted for during the planning phase. Learn from similar situations in the current project.
PROJECT ESTIMATED VS ACTUALS
By studying the difference between the estimated and actual times and costs during separate project phases it’s possible to make more accurate predictions on future projects.
Review which project time phases and costs were under and over estimated. Then focus on the estimates made by those who worked on the project plan. This information can be used to create a “normalizing” factor (ratio of estimated to actuals). These factors can later be applied to the various estimates produced by specific contributors.
Sometimes, by showing contributors these norms, they can improve their future estimating skill and avoid over or under estimating project costs and times.
To really improve the ability to make time and budget estimates moreeffective, an organization can create a process to capture needed data during the normal project reporting process. The financial and schedule reporting process can then be structured appropriately from the beginning to produce the required estimated versus actuals reports over the project timeline. This allows the reporting function to automatically capture the data needed. Such information will increase the ease of use this strategy and help it to be implemented on all subsequent projects.
OUTSOURCED AND REMOTE TEAMS
With many organizations outsourcing work on a project, to other plants in the company, or to outside vendors, opportunities are created for project problem areas. These opportunities increase significantly if the work that is oursourced is done by team members who live in a significantly different time zone from other team members.
If the project under review utilized remote teams, capturing the problem areas created by different time zones and cultures can be invaluable for future projects.
PROJECT SPONSOR SUPPORT
Project sponsors need to interact with the Project Managers and the team for the project to be effective. Look for how this interaction worked on the current project to learn new ways to improve it in the future.
IN SUMMARY
It is very critical to examine and record the project aspects we discussed so that the factors that created ineffective project flow can be corrected or mitigated in the future. This can be accomplished in a series of Lessons- Learned meetings held periodically on the project.
The process created by formalizing this learning can lead to considerable reduction in project stress, cost and schedule time as the organization implements a learning model.
Should you wish to learn more about the lessons learned process, please give me a call at (408) 462-2189.