rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 113,What Your Turkey Can Teach You About Project Management,"The problem with project management is that everyone thinks it’s boring. Well, that’s not really the problem. The problem is that everyone thinks it’s boring but it’s still really important. Project management is what lets you deliver your art – whether that be design or development. In the same way, a Christmas dinner cooked by a brilliant chef with no organizational skills is disastrous – courses arrive in the wrong order, some things are cold whilst others are raw and generally it’s a trip to the ER waiting to happen. Continuing the Christmas dinner theme, here are my top tips for successful projects, wrapped up in a nice little festive analogy. Enjoy! Tip 1: Know What You’re Aiming For (Turkey? Ham? Both??) The underlying cause for the failure of so many projects is mismatched expectations. Christmas dinner cannot be a success if you serve glazed ham and your guests view turkey as the essential Christmas dinner ingredient. It doesn’t matter how delicious and well executed your glazed ham is, it’s still fundamentally just not turkey. You might win one or two adventurous souls over, but the rest will go home disappointed. Add to the mix the fact that most web design projects are nowhere near as emotive as Christmas dinner (trust me, a ham vs turkey debate will rage much longer than a fixed vs fluid debate in normal human circles) and the problem is compounded. In particular, as technologists, we forget that our ability to precisely imagine the outcome of a project, be it a website, a piece of software, or similar, is much more keenly developed than the average customer of such projects. So what’s the solution? Get very clear, from the very beginning, on exactly what the project is about. What are you trying to achieve? How will you measure success? Is the presence of turkey a critical success factor? Summarize all this information in some form of document (in PM-speak, it’s called a Project Initiation Document typically). Ideally, get the people who are the real decision makers to sign their agreement to that summary in their own blood. Well, you get the picture, I suppose actual blood is not strictly necessary, but a bit of gothic music to set the tone can be useful! Tip 2: Plan at the Right Level of Detail Hugely detailed and useless Gantt charts are a personal bugbear of mine. For any project, you should plan at the appropriate level of detail (and in an appropriate format) for the project itself. In our Christmas dinner example, it may be perfectly fine to have a list of tasks for the preparation work, but for the intricate interplay of oven availability and cooking times, something more complex is usually due. Having cooked roast dinners for fourteen in a student house where only the top oven and two of the rings on the hob actually worked, I can attest to the need for sequence diagrams in some of these situations! The mistake many small teams make is to end up with a project plan that is really the amalgamation of their individual todo lists. What is needed is a project plan that will: reflect reality be easy to update help to track progress (i.e. are we on track or not?) A good approach is to break your project into stages (each representing something tangible) and then into deliverables (again, something tangible for each milestone, else you’ll never know if you’ve hit it or not!). My personal rule of thumb is that the level of granularity needed on most projects is 2-3 days – i.e. we should never be more than two to three days from a definitive milestone which will either be complete or not. The added advantage of this approach is that if find yourself off track, you can only be two to three days off track… much easier to make up than if you went weeks or even months working hard but not actually delivering what was needed! In our Christmas dinner example, there are a number of critical milestones – a tick list of questions. Do we have all the ingredients? Check. Has the turkey been basted? Check. On the actual day, the sequencing and timing will mean more specific questions: It’s 12pm. Are the Brussels sprouts cooked to death yet? Check. (Allowing for the extra hour of boiling to go from soft and green to mushy and brown… Yeuch!) Tip 3: Actively Manage Risks and Issues A risk is something that could go wrong. An issue is something that has already gone wrong. Risks and issues are where project management superstars are born. Anyone can manage things when everything is going according to plan; it’s what you do when Cousin Jim refuses to eat anything but strawberry jam sandwiches that sorts the men from the boys. The key with a Christmas dinner, as with any project, is to have contingency plans for the most likely and most damaging risks. These depend on your own particular situation, but some examples might be: RISK CONTINGENCY PLAN Cousin Jim is a picky eater. Have strawberry jam and sliced white bread on hand to placate. Prime organic turkey might not be available at Waitrose on Christmas eve. Shop in advance! You live somewhere remote that seems to lose power around Christmas on a disturbingly regular basis. (number of options here depending on how far you want to go…) Buy a backup generator. Invent a new cooking method using only candles. Stock up on “Christmas dinner in a tin”. Your mother in law is likely to be annoying. Bottle of sherry at the ready (whether it’s for you or her, you can decide!). The point of planning in advance is so that most of your issues don’t blindside you – you can spring into action with the contingency plan immediately. This leaves you with plenty of ingenuity and ability to cope in reserve for those truly unexpected events. Back in your regular projects, you should have a risk management plan (developed at the beginning of the project and regularly reviewed) as well as an issue list, tracking open, in progress and closed issues. Importantly, your issue list should be separate from any kind of bug list – issues are at a project level, bugs are at a technical level. Tip 4: Have a Project Board A project board consists of the overall sponsor of your project (often, but not always, the guy with the cheque book) and typically a business expert and a technical expert to help advise the sponsor. The project board is the entity that is meant to make the big, critical decisions. As a project manager, your role is to prepare a recommendation, but leave the actual decision up to the board. Admittedly this is where our Christmas dinner analogy has to stretch the most, but if you imagine that instead of just cooking for your family you are the caterer preparing a Christmas feast for a company. In this case, you obviously want to please the diners who will be eating the food, but key decisions are likely to be taken by whoever is organizing the event. They, in turn, will involve the boss if there are really big decisions that would affect the project drastically – for instance, having to move it to January, or it exceeding the set budget by a significant amount. Most projects suffer from not having a project board to consult for these major decisions, or from having the wrong people selected. The first ailment is eased by ensuring that you have a functioning project board, with whom you either meet regularly to update on status, or where there is a special process for convening the board if they are needed. The second problem is a little more subtle. Key questions to ask yourself are: Who is funding this project? Who has the authority to stop the project if it was the right thing to do? Who are the right business and technical advisors? Who are the folks who don’t look like they are powerful on the org chart, but in fact might scupper this project? (e.g. administrators, tech support, personal assistants…) Tip 5: Finish Unequivocably and Well No one is ever uncertain as to when Christmas dinner ends. Once the flaming pudding has been consumed and the cheese tray picked at, the end of the dinner is heralded by groaning and everyone collapsing in their chairs. Different households have different rituals, so you might only open your presents after Christmas dinner (unlikely if you have small children!), or you might round off the afternoon watching the Queen’s speech (in Britland, certainly) or if you live in warmer climes you might round off Christmas dinner with a swim (which was our tradition in Cape Town – after 30 mins of food settling so you didn’t get cramp, of course!). The problem with projects is that they are one time efforts and so nowhere near as ritualized. Unless you have been incredibly lucky, you’ve probably worked on a project where you thought you were finished but seemed unable to lose your “zombie customers” – those folks who just didn’t realise it was over and kept coming back with more and more requests. You might even have fallen prey to this yourself, believing that the website going live was the end of the project and not realising that a number of things still needed to be wrapped up. The essence of this final tip is to inject some of that end-of-Christmas finality ritual into your projects. Find your own ritual for closing down projects – more than just sending the customer the invoice and archiving the files. Consider things like documentation, support structure handover and training to make sure that those zombies are going to the right people (hopefully not you!). So, to summarise: Make sure you start your projects well – with an agreed (written) vision of what you’re trying to achieve. Plan your projects at the right level of detail and in an appropriate format – never be more than a few days away from knowing for sure whether you’re on track or not. Plan for likely and important risks and make sure you track and resolve those you actually encounter. Institute a project board, made up of the people with the real power over your project. Create rituals for closing projects well – don’t leave anyone in doubt that the project has been delivered, or of who they should go to for further help.",2008,Meri Williams,meriwilliams,2008-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/what-your-turkey-can-teach-you-about-project-management/,business 312,Preparing to Be Badass Next Year,"Once we’ve eaten our way through the holiday season, people will start to think about new year’s resolutions. We tend to focus on things that we want to change… and often things that we don’t like about ourselves to “fix”. We set rules for ourselves, or try to start new habits or stop bad ones. We focus in on things we will or won’t do. For many of us the list of things we “ought” to be spending time on is just plain overwhelming – family, charity/community, career, money, health, relationships, personal development. It’s kinda scary even just listing it out, isn’t it? I want to encourage you to think differently about next year. The ever-brilliant Kathy Sierra articulates a better approach really well when talking about the attitude we should have to building great products. She tells us to think not about what the user will do with our product, but about what they are trying to achieve in the real world and how our product helps them to be badass1. When we help the user be badass, then we are really making a difference. I suppose this is one way of saying: focus not on what you will do, focus on what it will help you achieve. How will it help you be awesome? In what ways do you want to be more badass next year? A professional lens Though of course you might want to focus in on health or family or charity or community or another area next year, many people will want to become more badass in their chosen career. So let’s talk about a scaffold to help you figure out your professional / career development next year. First up, an assumption: everyone wants to be awesome. Nobody gets up in the morning aiming to be crap at their job. Nobody thinks to themselves “Today I am aiming for just south of mediocre, and if I can mess up everybody else’s ability to do good work then that will be just perfect2”. Ergo, you want to be awesome. So what does awesome look like? Danger! The big trap that people fall into when think about their professional development is to immediately focus on the things that they aren’t good at. When you ask people “what do you want to work on getting better at next year?” they frequently gravitate to the things that they believe they are bad at. Why is this a trap? Because if you focus all your time and energy on improving the areas that you suck at, you are going to end up middling at everything. Going from bad → mediocre at a given skill / behaviour takes a bunch of time and energy. So if you spend all your time going from bad → mediocre at things, what do you think you end up? That’s right, mediocre. Mediocrity is not a great career goal, kids. What do you already rock at? The much better investment of time and energy is to go from good → awesome. It often takes the same amount of relative time and energy, but wow the end result is better! So first, ask yourself and those who know you well what you are already pretty damn good at. Combat imposter syndrome by asking others. Then figure out how to double down on those things. What does brilliant look like for a given skill? What’s the knowledge or practice that you need to level yourself up even further in that thing? But what if I really really suck? Admittedly, sometimes something you suck at really is holding you back. But it’s important to separate out weaknesses (just something you suck at) from controlling weaknesses (something you suck at that actually matters for your chosen career). If skill x is just not an important thing for you to be good at, you may never need to care that you aren’t good at it. If your current role or the one you aspire to next really really requires you to be great at x, then it’s worth investing your time and energy (and possibly money too) getting better at it. So when you look at the things that you aren’t good at, which of those are actually essential for success? The right ratio A good rule of thumb is to pick three things you are already good at to work on becoming awesome at and limit yourself to one weakness that you are trying to improve on. That way you are making sure that you get to awesome in areas where you already have an advantage, and limit the amount of time you are spending on going from bad → mediocre. Levelling up learning So once you’ve figured out your areas you want to focus on next year, what do you actually decide to do? Most of all, you should try to design your day-to-day work in a way that it is also an effective learning experience. This means making sure you have a good feedback loop – you get to try something, see if it works, learn from it, rinse and repeat. It’s also about balance: you want to be challenged enough for work to be interesting, without it being so hard it’s frustrating. You want to do similar / the same things often enough that you get to learn and improve, without it being so repetitive that it’s boring. Continuously getting better at things you are already good at is actually both easier and harder than it sounds. The advantage is that it’s pretty easy to add the feedback loop to make sure that you are improving; the disadvantage is that you’re already good at these skills so you could easily just “do” without ever stopping to reflect and improve. Build in time for personal retrospectives (“What went well? What didn’t? What one thing will I choose to change next time?”) and find a way of getting feedback from outside sources as well. As for the new skills, it’s worth knowing that skill development follows a particular pattern: We all start out unconsciously incompetent (we don’t know what to do and if we tried we’d unwittingly get it wrong), progress on to conscious incompetence (we now know we’re doing it wrong) then conscious competence (we’re doing it right but wow it takes effort and attention) and eventually get to unconscious competence (automatically getting it right). Your past experiences and knowledge might let you move faster through these stages, but no one gets to skip them. Invest the time and remember you need the feedback loop to really improve. What about keeping up? Everything changes very fast in our industry. We need to invest in not falling behind, in keeping on top of what great looks like. There are a bunch of ways to do this, from reading blog posts, following links on Twitter, reading books to attending conferences or workshops, or just finding time to build things in new ways or with new technologies. Which will work best for you depends on how you best learn. Do you prefer to swallow a book? Do you learn most by building or experimenting? Whatever your learning style though, remember that there are three real needs: Scan the landscape (what’s changing, does it matter) Gain the knowledge or skills (get the detail) Apply the knowledge or skills (use it in reality) When you remember that you need all three of these things it can help you get more of what you do. For me personally, I use a combination of conferences and blogs / Twitter to scan the landscape. Half of what I want out of a conference is just a list of things to have on my radar that might become important. I then pick a couple of things to go read up on more (I personally learn most effectively by swallowing a book or spec or similar). And then I pick one thing at a time to actually apply in real life, to embed the skill / knowledge. In summary Aim to be awesome (mediocrity is not a career goal). Figure out what you already rock at. Only care about stuff you suck at that matters for your career. Pick three things to go from good → awesome and one thing to go from bad → mediocre (or mediocre → good) this year. Design learning into your daily work. Scan the landscape, learn new stuff, apply it for real. Be badass! She wrote a whole book about it. You should read it: Badass: Making Users Awesome ↩ Before you argue too vehemently: I suppose some antisocial sociopathic bastards do exist. Identify them, and then RUN AWAY FAST AS YOU CAN #realtalk ↩",2016,Meri Williams,meriwilliams,2016-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/preparing-to-be-badass-next-year/,business