Making Good Project Decisions – Part 1

Everything you do every day is a kind of decision: what time to wake up, what to eat for breakfast, and who to talk to first at work. We don’t often think of these as decisions because the consequences are so small, but we are always making choices. We all have our own natural judgments for which decisions in our lives demand more consideration, and the same kind of logic applies to project management decisions. Some choices, like hiring/firing employees or defining goals, will have ramifications that last for months or years. Because these decisions will have a longer and deeper impact, it makes sense to spend more time considering the choices and thinking through their different tradeoffs. Logically, smaller or less-important decisions deserve less energy.

So, the first part of decision-making is to determine the significance of the decision at hand. Much of the time, we do this instinctively; we respond to the issue and use our personal judgment. Am I confident that I can make a good decision on the spot, or do I need more time for this? It often takes only a few moments to sort this out. However, this is precisely where many of us run into trouble. Those instincts might be guided by the right or wrong factors. Without taking the time, at least now and then, to break it down and evaluate the pieces that lead to that judgment, we don’t really know what biases and assumptions might be driving our thinking (e.g., desiring a promotion or protecting a preferred feature).

With that in mind, here are some core questions to consider when evaluating a decision. This list can be used in the moment to help size up a specific decision, or as a way to re-evaluate your high-level criteria for sizing up decisions.

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More on Green Business and Project Management

In the US, the 2010 Super Bowl XLIV broke all records for viewership with 106.5 million people tuning in.  That’s even more than the 27-year-old record held by the tear-jerking M*A*S*H finale that drew 105.97 million viewers.

As for the Super Bowl ads – well, I would have to say they were sub-par this year.  But there was no shortage of car-related ads and my favorite (but remember I’m partial) was Audi’s ad featuring a re-recording of Cheap Trick’s “Dream Police” as the “Green Police.”  The ad was for Audi’s green car, the A3 TDI clean diesel automobile.  The ad is actually very good and was voted the best auto-related ad of for this year’s Super Bowl.  In case you missed it, you can view it here.

It’s obvious that “green” is definitely the new black – or however people are stating it these days.  I wrote one article on ‘green’ project management back in May 2009 and I’ve since been asked to write several more and interviewed on the subject for two online articles and a major print publication.  Everybody wants to know about going green, apparently.

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Final Thoughts on Requirement Prioritization

Your first priority in the requirement prioritization may be selling the stakeholders on the concept of prioritizing requirements before design start.  This isn’t an easy task.  As we discussed, a customer stakeholder is likely to react with the notion that you’re actually trying to eliminate requirements.  You have to convince them that this is not the case.

Once the stakeholders agree to prioritizing requirements, you will guide the stakeholders through the prioritization process.  Then, you will incorporate the results into the project or the product development schedules and budgets.  You must enforce the priorities throughout the development process.

As development progresses, you will identify situations that trigger use of the priorities.  These situations may include: impending resource shortages, changes in external constraints or expectations, and conflicts.  You must ensure that the priorities rule the outcome.

Requirement prioritization early in development helps a manager control project risk and change.  Knowing requirement priorities focuses a product or project development team and guides intelligent choices for phasing in product features over time.  It prevents the “bailing” that so often occurs just before delivery, in which partially implemented requirements are thrown overboard in a frantic effort to save dwindling resources for finishing the critical components.  Above all, it’s one more communication channel between customers and developers.

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Improving Requirements Quality with Use Cases

People sometimes like to dive right in to requirements definition by simply starting to write them on a blank sheet of paper – or blank Word doc for those of us who have gone completely green. Starting the requirements definition process this way can be very intimidating at best and full of oversights, omissions, and conflicts at worst. Even if you define and document scope in detail as I’ve discussed in the past, it’s still a big leap from a scope document to detailed requirements. Customers often have a hard time with requirements and you certainly can’t write all the requirements for them. You can help … but be sure to bill for it.

Sample ATM system usage use case diagram

Use cases are a simple, cost-effective way to build a consensus among stakeholders and to discover missing requirements. They tend to address two large classes of requirements errors – omitted requirements and conflicting requirements. While drilling down further into requirements, the customer – usually with your help – can utilize use cases to get detailed requirements across all life-cycle phases to support the requirements definition process.

Why develop use cases?

Use cases are relatively easy to generate. The customer must access their stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) to get well-thought out use cases that can be used to derive detailed and meaningful requirements for the engagement. Below are some of the reasons and pluses for generating these use cases: Read more »

Running a Project on a Shoestring Budget

The post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner.  Please visit their site for more information.

If you’re working in a large corporation with a very professional PMO already in place and a handsome budget set for the project you’ve just acquired, then this article is probably not for you.

Budget management is always important, but it’s highly likely that the amenities you need to manage your project with the high-paying customer that has been lined up are already built into the overhead of the project. The flights to the customer site are built in by Sales during the negotiation process, as are some additional equipment that may be needed specific to your project and implementation.

However, if that is not the type of project you’re running, then please read on as you might find something interesting or helpful from this information. I’ve been working mostly remotely as an IT project manager for the past 3+ years. Sometimes that has involved running large multi-million dollar projects for deep-pocketed clients meaning the little things and extras on a project definitely aren’t an issue. No concerns with cutting back because certain things are expected and are built in to the overall price of the project.

On the flipside, if you’re an independent consultant – as I am – and you have a mix of customers, then you’re likely to have a few clients that do not have deep pockets. These clients watch every dime they spend and that means of course that everything you do can and will be subject to their scrutiny. It also means that you have to watch how you do business carefully because you’ve likely not been able to price the project with a comfortable profit margin. It’s more likely that your margin is small and if something goes wrong causing extra work – and it’s your fault – you could be doing much of the work for free!

Here are some specific things that I do to reduce costs, keep things greener in terms of resource usage, etc. and keep the customer’s expectations steady in terms of on-going project costs:

• Bill the client a fixed price every two weeks or every month. This is basically like a retainer and if I’m doing this, I bill the work up front. It’s too risky in this economic climate to bill after the fact. Only do that if you really want (or need) this particular customer and they won’t budge at all on the upfront billing issue. Most will budge or meet you halfway letting you bill at the beginning of a two-week period and then pay you one week into it.
• Use video conferencing and teleconferencing whenever possible. This way you can avoid costly travel for the project and for your client. You can get video conferencing setups free at places like DimDim (www.dimdim.com) and you can get free conference calls at Freeconferencecall.com.
• Use free over-the-web fax services. Faxzero (www.faxzero.com) allows you to send faxes for free and Faxdigits (www.faxdigits.com) gives you a number to receive faxes with – they then come to you as a pdf file and you retrieve them online.
• Use a free pdf document converter. There are an increasing number of free pdf converters available now. It use to be that you had to have an expensive version of Adobe Acrobat to convert files to pdf format. Now you can download software like PrimoPDF (www.primopdf.com) and CutePDF (www.cutepdf.com), among others. I’ve tried several of these and the quality so far has been good on every one that I’ve tried.

Summary

There are a lot of options available these days to make the small vendor or independent consultant look bigger and many of them are free. The key is to start looking now, test out your different options and chose the best one. You definitely want to look professional and be ready when the need is there, so don’t procrastinate.