Yazzgoth, a software development company based in Cork, Ireland was approaching the final stages of a significant project with a European Security Services organisation and progress was slowing to a crawl. Yazzgoth was one of 5 project teams, across 3 countries and was not the only team struggling to meet deadlines.
I was asked to review the status of the project and act as project manager to bring it back on track as there was only 4 months and the team was becoming demoralised at the lack of progress.
On talking to each of the people on the Yazzgoth team, it was obvious that there was not a lack of skill or enthusiasm on the team so I went back to basics to understand where the problems were.
Step 1 – Understand what the overall objective of the project is and what we are responsible for delivering.
There had been a number of changes of leadership on this project at the client side and a scarcity of high level documentation so it was not easy to discover what the objective of the project was and what the expectations of us were.
Step 2 – Made contact with the other project teams and asked what their tasks and deadlines were and what we could do to help them.
As people were already feeling a bit defensive about the slippages, my approach was to speak to all those in the other teams responsible for delivering tasks what their problems were and how we could work together to help each other meet our deadlines. This worked well and we agreed a few simple changes, particularly around communicating with each other regularly would improve the situation.
Step 3 – Introduced short daily calls for the project management team and another for the developers. This daily call was used to review work done yesterday, tasks for today and to share any actual or potential roadblocks.
These meeting, via skype, s initially took a full 15 minutes as we were tempted to use them to solve problems as well as give our status reports, but we soon got them down to an ideal 5 minutes and organised additional calls to sort out any issues.
Step 4 – Got all outstanding work onto an online ticketing system so we could keep track of current and outstanding tasks.
Once we could see all the work that needed to be done, we could start making real progress. Having all our tasks online also meant we knew what each other was working on, very helpful for me as I was working from home for much of the week.
Step 4 – Introduced a regular cycle of two weekly releases, agreed and prioritised with the product owner in advance.
Once we had a clearer idea of the tasks to complete the project, we started to get into a rhythm two weekly cycles. The week before a new cycle was spent agreeing the priorities for the release and rehearsing the work to be done. Then a week and a half of development and a the remaining couple of days to document, complete testing and do a demo the client of that cycles progress. The following week we analysed our own progress and implemented ideas to further improve our work practises.
Step 5 – Introduced time recording to improve our estimating skills and auditabilty of invoices.
The final, and most difficult, step was to introduce time recording for all so we could get feedback on how accurate our original estimates were. While we did get a better feel for where time was going, our estimating skills were still too optimistic at the end of the project and this whole area of getting useful feedback to help improve the ability of an individual and a group to deliver is a subject I am currently addressing.
So thanks to the hard work of all involved, the project was finished on time (just!) and the client was very impressed by the improvements in our delivery and communication. There were a lot of lessons learnt by all, and I was able to further improve my project management toolkit as a result.
