Six Assured Steps to Become Worst Project Manager

1. Vision and Leadership: As a project manager never provide any technology vision and leadership in the development and implementation to your teams engaged in your project.

2. Planning: No planning must be done to build your customer’s operations in the application you are building. Thus this way you will not be required to provide any support at a later stage (since the project will never get over!). In worst case if you are forced to plan, plan for a most ineffective and costliest solution.

3. Strategy: Build a strategy to enhance all sorts of problems in the development, evaluation and coordination during your project.

4. Communication: Communication is your worst enemy. Build and maintain least communication between your teams, management, customer and other stakeholders involved in the project within and outside the organization.

5. Productive System: If you build a productive system, it will definitely stop the growth of end users. Let you be humane enough to not to stop them lose their productivity in any manner by giving them an effective system. Guide your development team to build simplest of the business requirements in most complex manner in the application.

6. Training: As a project manager do not plan any training for the product to the customer management or the end users. Even if you plan some training, you will not be able to conduct because you are not aware of the system you have built for your customer.

Five Ways to Increase Project Risk

1. Project Definition: Either don’t define your project or define it in most ambiguous manner so that even if you read it again, you are not able to make anything out of it. Don’t define Project Charter comprising of project vision, project objective, project scope and project deliverables. This way you will never come to know what is to be achieved. So How to achieve and when to achieve will never bother you except that your project risk will shoot up manifold. And that is what we intend to do here.

2. Project Plan: Once your project definition is prepared in most ambiguous manner, start preparing your project plan in such a manner that it never sees the light of the day.

3. Project Team: Comprise your project team with lousiest people in the organization and give them liberty to do whatever they want to do. Don’t bother if they don’t understand what this project is about since you even don’t know this. Moreover if they come to know what this project is about, your task will increase. You will have to assign tasks to them and in turn your accountability will increase thereby decreasing the risk.

4. Project Risk Management: Do no risk identification, assessment, or risk mitigation plan even if you are able not to follow above steps.

5. Reward Scheme: Announce a reward scheme in your organization that whosoever will create risk for the project will be rewarded accordingly depending on the level of risk created. Motivate your employees, team members to contribute bigger and bigger risks to the project.

Though by following these steps you deserve the Highest Risk Creator Award but don’t be so selfish. Let it go to someone else. Trying is no harm, maybe someone else in the team is more talented than you.

22 Ways to Increase your Project Success Rate

1. Overcome constraints
2. Increase quality of service
3. Drive your team to perform better and become more productive
4. Keep yourself and your teams Happy
5. Have a stable and consistently improving process mechanism in place
6. Transform your teams to High Performing Teams
7. Keep your benefits higher than cost
8. Set your goals clearly
9. Drive yourself and make it mandatory for everyone in the team, your business will be driven automatically
10. Have useful self assessment tools in the organization to be used by everyone
11. Maintain bold leadership
12. optimize for Excellence, not success
13. Convert your process bottlenecks to process accelerators
14. Stand up to Threats
15. Have employee performance management system
16. Have a clear visibility on the work of the team
17. Maintain a delivery Cadence
18. Optimize software quality procedures
19. Maintain service and support driven by SLAs
20. Have a good communication system in place
21. Base your development on project objectives driven through customer requirements
22. Address all business situations

Six Contributors to the Reputation Risk of Your Software Project

Reputation and reputation risk both are estimated during the project and the way it progresses while crossing its milestones. The customer is the last milestone in any project and it is the external agency like customer or the market from where the reputation or reputation risk is established about a product. Reputation and reputation risk are inversely proportional to each other. The Reputation on one hand brings in more business and orders. The higher reputation risk brings in a threat of lowering in business or product sale.

No organization or product owner wishes for a higher reputation risk. Though every product is associated with some percentage of reputation risk it will be foolish for a product owner or project manager if the risk assessment is not done well in advance and the appropriate steps are not taken in advance to mitigate the risk.

Six major contributors to the software project are:

1. Customer – end users, customer management
2. Product requirements – not well told, not well understood, not well documented, not well translated into the product
3. Project Team – documentation, development, testing, implementation, training
4. Development Process – how well the product has been understood and developed
5. Product Testing – it is not the tester but the testing procedure that matters more
6. Implementation Team – sign offs, training, meetings

Ten Reasons to Adopt Hoshin Kanri for Project Management

Project Management is an Art and Science both. An artistic touch makes it beautiful. A scientific approach makes it successful. Both are essential in case of a software project. Hoshin Kanri is a Japanese term. In Japanese, hoshin means compass or moving in the right direction and kanri means management or control. The combination would mean either “moving in right direction to have a better control” or “controlling it in a masterly way to move in the right direction. This is a great tool for any management to enhance their project management or urge for excellence so as to move towards better optimization and least defects in their processes.

A well defined process and its adherence make it possible to achieve higher standards in process optimization. Many organizations have no defined processes in place. Others have well defined processes but no adherence or a wide gap in what is defined and what is being followed. The organizations are capable to sustain and enhance their growth and success via doing the both – defining best practices in their project processes and adhering to those practices so that there is least gap between the two.

An organization would definitely require adopting “Hoshin Kanri” if they are facing following issues in their project management:
1. If there is no planning process in place or if there is a process defined but there is no monitoring on a regular basis of what is defined and what is being followed.
2. If the processes are age old with no reviews and improvements analysis.
3. If the processes are well defined and lying in a closet and people who are the project owners are not aware of those processes.
4. If actions performed in projects differ to what is defined in the relevant process.
5. If processes are discouraging and demotivating in nature.
6. If lot of improvement projects are running in the organization with no or little improvement apparently visible.
7. If people are held responsible for failures rather than focusing on improvement of process.
8. If results of strategic objectives differ from actual work in place.
9. If opinions play major role in decision making than the facts trying to lead to different cause to be taken care of.
10. If Customer is not HAPPY.

Seven Commandants for the Success of any Project

What Generates Reputation Risk to my New Software Product?

As discussed in the previous article “What is Reputation Risk in regard to a Software Product?” the situation can arise in case of any product or any company. There is no point in getting bogged down if after all sincere efforts the product has failed to be successful at customer place. Better option is to find out the reasons behind its failure or rather put all your efforts to find out what is missing in the product that has not been able to convince the end user and their management. Instead of losing heart and withdrawing the product, focus on those points, act upon them and reproduce the product to the management and the users.

The best way to do this is to quantify the reputation risk. The amazing reasons will emerge out once you start quantifying it. Worst scenario could be that there is nothing wrong with the product but still user’s acceptance level is quite low. Probably the product has been launched or introduced in a wrong way. Probably it has not been introduced to the users well. Probably its key features have not been highlighted the way they should have been.

What is Reputation Risk in regard to a Software Product?

Reputation risk of the product is a very critical factor related to a product that a company delivers to its customer(s). The reputation risk of a product is directly related to the rate of acceptance of a product by its end users and is indirectly related to the volume of benefit it delivers to the management of that organization.

Let use start with the customer requirements based on which a company decided to develop a software product. The software is produced after following all internal procedures of development, testing etc. and is declared as ‘ready to launch’. It reaches to the customer along with the implementation team. The implementation team educates the end users about the product and its usage. The end user starts using it but somehow feel uncomfortable in what they perceived and what it delivers.

If end user is not comfortable about the product functioning and its usage they will definitely not be able to deliver the desired results to the management of their organization.

The lack of interest by end user due to whatsoever reasons will cause a bad name to the product as it is not going to deliver the desired results in the organization. Assuming that the product has been developed with utmost care but still if it could not convince the users, it is a bad luck for the product and the company that has developed it.

This is how the reputation of a product is built which in turn largely affects the company who has developed that product.

Ten Benefits of Continuous Learning Programs for Project Teams

There is no end to learning. Still water becomes contaminated and harmful for use. Continuous flowing water keeps it fresh and pure. Similarly if your developers and testers or for that sake anybody in the organization keeps performing the same functions without any improvement or value addition, it is like no update and no upgrade.

Any organization must have a continuous learning program for their technical teams. Rather irrespective of the stream a candidate belongs to, all must have a continuous learning program. Organizations that do not focus on this area, invite more employee turnover and less dedicated employees. There are many benefits beyond stated here but main benefits of having continuous learning program for project teams would be:

1. Performance: The performance of your project team members will increase manifold. Their efficiency will be better.

2. Recognition: Team members will be willingly staying for a longer period in the organization. So if their performance keeps improving and they stay in the organization for a longer number of years, definitely it is a boost for the organization.

3. Empowerment: Teams are self motivated, empowered and more organized.

4. Turnover: There will be tremendous decrease in employee turnover.

5. Flawless Speed of Delivery: The delivery in their respective areas will be flawless and spontaneous.

6. Role Models: Such employees with high performance, complete dedication, longer years of service and quick delivery will definitely set an example for others in the organization and hence will attract better employees to join the organization from outside. Internally also it will keep a healthy competition among the teams and team members.

7. Culture: This will lead to a strong learning culture within the organization. Continuous improvement will be a subset of this culture.

8. Brand Ambassador: Not only the employees working in the organization but even those who leave the organization and join somewhere else would be the brand ambassadors of the organization.

9. Consistency: The organization as a whole will be on a trend of consistently improving organization thereby optimizing its potential and achieving new heights. This way organization can aim for bigger goals to achieve.

10. Social Impact: With such a culture, the employees will not only be leaders within their own professional spheres but will excel in their personal arenas too thereby setting an example in the society.

Learning is a life long process with no bars.

Have You Installed Latest Patch For YOUR OWN Upgrade

Like a piece of software or hardware requires regular upgrades and updates to perform smoothly with the changes scenarios, a programmer or tester also needs the same. Or for that sake every human being on personal and professional front requires it. How it is done is important. In case of software or hardware the update or upgrade patch is released at regular intervals by their respective manufacturer or owner to keep it updated. How is it needs to be done in case of us – the human beings. Here comes the role of reading, exploring, training, brainstorming, discussion, interaction with peers and superiors etc. There is a big difference between the flowing water and still water. Movement is life. Improvement and enhancement are essential for growth at both fronts – personal as well as professional.

As we all know books are the best friends. Any read will give you some or the other learning. So it is important to keep reading latest books, articles, views relevant to your job. Join in some important newsletters, forums, sites that keep you abreast in your technology area. Reading blogs, subscribing to RSS is another thing that can be done easily to keep getting information flow. Training is important for all ages. There is no end to learning. There is always a scope of new learning, improvement and knowledge acquiring. Don’t wait for someone to sponsor for your training. Go ahead, find out the requirement for yourself and jump into a training session. Investment in training always gets you returns in manifold.