Project Team Blog

A few years ago I learned a valuable lesson.  I was working for a fairly large company in the order/shipping department to improve performance.  We were losing money on mis-picked items.  A customer order would be placed in a box with 1 to 15 items to ship.  That box would travel through our pick line, stopping at various stations, where human operators would pick the items ordered out of a bin, and place it in the box for shipment.  Too often, customers received the wrong items.  Then an employee would go out of sequence, make a special order and ship the correct item, a second time! 

My job was to reduce the number of incorrectly shipped (mis-picked) items.  To do that, I had auditors randomly inspect the pick line orders.  The ship line auditors despised our presence and we saw no marked improvement over the first few months. 

One day we had a meeting with the shift leads on the pick-line to explain why we were doing the audits.  We explained how a small decrease in the percentage of mis-picks would save our company hundreds of thousands of dollars and add to the bottom line.  In turn, this would increase their profit sharing bonus checks.

Over the next year we had a significant reduction in mis-picks and we received record profit sharing.  This happened in large part because we decided to share a little piece of information as to why we are doing what we do.  All too often we are quick to tell people to do something assuming they already know the reasons or don’t care, instead of explaining why!  I was guilty, and from time to time I imagine I still get in that “just do it!” mode.  However, I’ve learned that it is worth a few extra minutes to share the reasons behind our decisions.

–Warren

How do you know when your product is ready for release to waiting fans?  Does it have what they want?  Is it high enough quality?  Will it crash and burn, costing you thousands of dollars?  Tough questions.  Unfortunately, there are no great answers, but consider the following factors.  They may help.

Keep it foundational
There’s always a temptation to boil the ocean with your grand scheme.  To have the best product in your class.  After all, you’ll never make money without it.  But this is a trap.  Great products take years to develop, and if you wait that long, you’ll never get a foothold in the marketplace.  It’s far better to get started early with a foundational product, and constantly improve it.

Listen to customers
Every feature in your product should come from customers.  Don’t invent stuff yourself unless you are certain it’s the next great thing, and then still don’t.  Chances are, you’ll have a tough time selling pipe-dream features that customers don’t ask for.

Always ready for release
This only applies after you have already released the product at least once, and applies best to iterative products like software.  Never dive so deeply into new features that you can’t release the product at least once a month - even when doing major upgrades.  Release the product frequently to beta testers and trusted customers, but don’t let it stay “down under” too long.  This keeps the bug count lower, and keeps you closer to customer input.

Test twice, and twice again
If you’re like most engineers, you’ll spend half your time polishing and fixing bugs.  But many don’t realize that.  They want to blaze new trails and invent new things - all the time.  But you can’t make a living like that.  Be patient with your product, allowing it to mature into a robust system.  Don’t walk off until you are sure it is.

Good luck with your release, and let me know how you made out. 

–ray

On the surface, resource leveling looks appealing.  It offers the ability to spread work out so that an employee never has too little and never has too much.  Sounds good, right?  Maybe not…  Read on and let me know what you think.

The problem I have stems from the term resource itself.  Some of my customers won’t even use the word because it turns employees into machines.  Are “resources” human beings?  No, they are just “things” to be used.

I don’t go that far with my interpretation.  I’m okay with the word “resource.”  I know what it means, and what it doesn’t mean.  But still, when software attempts to tell the employee when to work, something is wrong.  Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Spreading work around (as is in resource leveling) removes the human element from the project.  It turns employees into machines who crank out project hours, task after task after task with no regard to content.  One task is the same as another, right?

I’m sorry; people don’t work that way.  Machines do.  They love steady work.  Give them something to do, and they will churn it out day after day.  People work differently; they are diven by passions and love for the job.  They get excited about one task, and then another.  They schedule them in order of passion for the task at hand.  No passion - no work.

As soon as you allow software to tell your people when to come and go, the passion is gone.  Make sense?

–ray

Earned Value: The amount of money a project has already earned, based on percent complete.

Calculating earned value will let you know approximately how much money is in the bag.  Obviously, it has to pass through the Accounts Receivable department, but eventually the money will be there.  This scheme works well for projects where money tightly follows work.  In other words, you do the work, and the money follows soon after.  While that’s often true of service-based companies like consultancies, it is not always true of manufacturing projects.

When a company manufactures goods, there is a much longer pipeline to cash.  Money does not tightly follow work.  You develop the product, test it, manufacture it, test it again, market it, sell it, and then your customer pays.  That process can take months or years.  So earned value is not as tangible.  And, there is the upside of selling the same design for several years.

Standard Time® calculates earned value based on Actual Work times the Client Rate.  Obviously, this is very tightly connected to the work you perform.  Every hour means billable time.  For consultancies, this matches reality pretty closely.

–ray

Microsoft Project offers calendars that can be used to set the working hours for a project and the resources working on it.  In other words, you can set the base calendar for the project, and then override that with resource work times.  This post discusses how to set the working time in Microsoft Project.

The following steps will illustrate the effect that working time has on a task in a Microsoft Project file.

Set up a new task:

1. Enter a new task
2. Enter 8 hours for the Duration
3. Enter your Name as the Resource
4. You will notice that the task occupies one day  See below.

To change the base calendar for the project:

1. Choose Tools, Change Working Time
2. Choose “Standard (Project Calendar) from the dropdown
3. Hold down the control key and select all the working days of the month
4. Remove the 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM hours (to make half days)
5. Notice that the calendar has changed to show your new choices
6. Click OK, and notice that your task Gantt bar has gotten longer to accommodate the fewer hours per day.

To change the individual work hours for the resource:

1. Choose Tools, Change Working Time
2. Choose your name from the dropdown
3. Click on the second day of the task
4. Hold the control key down and select three days
5. Click the “Nonworking time” choice to signify a vacation
6. Click OK, and notice that the task has gotten every longer

–ray

I had the misfortune of incorrectly accusing a vendor, one of my company’s main suppliers, of neglect. It turns out…they weren’t neglectful at all!  I was wrong and had received bad information!!

I worked in the new product engineering group with a company that sold a lot of knick-knacks, similar to what you find in card shops like Hallmark.  We did catalog sales without a storefront.  My company had tens of millions in annual sales.  Part of my job was creating a new quality control program to improve the products we purchased from our manufactures.

One bright day I sat across from our main supplier and delicately challenged them on a few quality issues we had found in one of our recent audits.  You can only imagine my embarrassment to find that the product I trashed, was not theirs!  An auditor on the QA Team had incorrectly identified this problem product with the wrong vendor!  I had discussed three products in total, two of which belonged to them, the third did not.  Rather than making progress and improving the two products correctly identified as theirs, I spent the better part of two hours mending fences and eating crow.

Needless to say I had a long discussion with the auditor that filed the flawed report.  We put in place procedures to double check and verify products and correctly assign them to the right vendor.  I learned a valuable lesson that day.  Accuracy is important and usually doesn’t take much effort.  This was a lazy mistake that nearly brought down a 10 year relationship and wreaked havoc for thousands of other people.

Whether it is simple or complicated…having solid accurate information is a must.

–Warren

I’m going to put in my two cents regarding the sexification of enterprise software.  The argument of whether enterprise software needs to be sexy (to keep up with consumer products) is still on the table.  See the CIO article below.  I vote “Yes” and here’s why…

CIO article by Brian Watson: Newer innovations like software as a service, Web 2.0 and mobile applications are broadly available to those outside the IT department. For those consumers of business software, freshness and flash are key selling points.
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Foreward/Why-Enterprise-Software-Must-Be-Sexy/

Enterprise apps are made to serve a specific purpose.  They track project time (like Standard Time®) or access human resource records (like SAP®), or any number of specific jobs.  People use them every day, and their value lies in the depth of service they provide.  Apps that do a lot, command the big bucks.  Try to replace them, and you’ll have a huge battle.

But still, people have to use them every day.  And if they don’t like them, they gripe.  That huge battle to replace them suddenly looks pretty small compared to dealing with unhappy employees.   No big app can last forever in the face of employee dissatisfaction, regardless of its value in the enterprise.

And guess what?

All those employees have consumer items they compare the enterprise apps to.  Cell phones, big screen TV’s, PDA’s, cordless phones, etc.  They begin to expect the big enterprise apps to employ some of the sexy usability enhancements they find in their personal consumer items.

Think about it…  Would you rather use an enterprise app with 80’s-style “VCR” controls or those of your cool new MP3 player?  That’s why enterprise apps need to be sexy.

–ray

For product development teams, outsourcing almost always means “buying time.”  Every project has three aspects in contant tension: Time, Cost, Quality.

1. If you want to save time and get your product to market faster, you can pay more (cost) or make a smaller product (quality).

2. If you want to spend less money, you can delay the delivery date (time) or cut features (quality).

3. If you want a high quality product, you can spend more money (cost) or wait for it to mature (time).

Outsourcing clearly cost’s money.  So why do it?  To get your product to market faster, that’s why.  You are spending the money now, so that you can recouperate it earlier.  Beat the competition to market.

No?  You’re not doing it for that reason?  You’re using India as a cut-rate development shop?  Oops, that may be a mistake.  Remember the other aspects in constant tension?  Quality is one of them…

–ray

Critical Path: A series of tasks that extend a project to its longest finish date.  Tasks that depend upon previous tasks, causing a project to finish at the latest time.

A project’s critical path is your longest route from start to finish.  In other words, your project cannot be finished any quicker than through this series of tasks.  Eliminate or shorten some tasks, and your project will be completed sooner.

It is valuable to analyze a project’s critical path.  Sometimes you can offload tasks to other resources, effectively shortening it.  In essence, you are turning a series circuit into a parallel circuit with multiple paths.  Any time you can do this, you are trading time for resources.  Yes, it will cost more, but you’ll finish sooner.

Consider a simple project with 1,000 hours of work, all performed by a single person.  The critical path is that single-path sequence of tasks.  Task 1, then 2, then 3, and so on…  You get the idea.

What if you added another person who could do the same work?  The project would then be completed in 500 hours, utilizing two paths.  But do you have a second person?

This is the crux of project management - juggling time, resources, and cost to maximize productivity.  Quite a game, huh? 

–ray

This post discusses how to perform resource leveling in Microsoft Project.  Before we perform the steps, we should first define resource leveling.

Resource leveling is the act of moving project tasks so that employees are not over allocated.  In other words, tasks are moved to new dates so they are not all piled on top of each other.  This ensures that resources have steady work without gaps and without excessive demand.

Microsoft Project can perform a one-time leveling, or automatically perform it each time a task is changed.  Normally, resource leveling is most effective for projects that have tasks with constraints.  For instance, a task may be set to ‘Start No Earlier Than’ a certain date.  This constraint forces the task to start after a specified date.  Other tasks may need to be split to start before and after this task.  In fact, the example below demonstrates this exact scenario.

First, setup a new project:

1. Create two new tasks
2. Add resources to the tasks
3. Set the task durations
4. The tasks should look like the image below

Set a task constraint:

1. Drag the first task to the right so it overlaps the second task
2. Notice the task icon in the information column
3. Double-click on the task to see the Task Information dialog
4. Click the Advanced tab to see the task constraint

Level the tasks:

1. Choose Tools, Level Resources
2. Click Level Now
3. The results will be a split task that allows the resource to work before and after the first task.

–Newshirt

I once worked for a large company as a QA manager.  One day word got out that our VP of Customer Service was on the war path because damage complaints were up over 33% year to date!  It was costing us a lot of money to resend orders that were damaged upon arrival at our customer’s locations.

 I was a mid-level manager at the time and only heard rumblings from my superiors from high level meetings they attended.  I was instructed to change product packaging to hundreds of items, perform drop testing and all sorts of comparisons to reduce damage complaints.  Nothing worked.  After about six weeks of panic and fact finding no one had arrived at a reason for the problem .

Then one day I sat in on a high-level meeting.  I recalled a friend of mine that worked in our  call center telling me how we started resending new items, instead of coupons for damaged products.  It just so happened that our system calculated damage complaints based on resent items, not coupons.  I mentioned this during our meeting; we crunched the numbers and determined that damage complaints were NORMAL!  No increase had ever occurred, only the way we calculated them!!

I would have given anything to avoid those six weeks.  We invented new procedures, hired consultants and changed all of our packaging!  If only we would have talked about this before we initiated the changes!  Communication, although not always easy, is always essential.

–Warren

The four C’s of diamond cutting are Color, Clarity, Caret, and Cut.  Every stone is judged on these characteristics, and the price set accordingly.  My assertion is that these qualities also apply to the art of product development.  Engineers and Product Managers, listen up!  The value of products for your customers follows the same principles as cutting and polishing a beautiful stone.  Indulge me, and I’ll explain.

1. Color.  People expect beauty in the products they use, and will always choose a pleasing product to an ugly one.  This aspect of project development refers to the almost imperceptable touches of style you add to your work.  As left-brain engineers, we often overlook this.

2. Clarity.  Have you applied a ‘usability test’ to your product?  How clear is it?  How easy is it to navigate and complete the basic tasks?  Consider using a digital camera to study people using your product.  You’ll learn a lot about clarity and usability.

Polish: Refers to any blemishes on the surface of the diamond which are not significant enough to affect the clarity grade of the diamond. Examples of blemishes that might be considered as ‘polish’ characteristics are faint polishing lines and small surface nicks or scratches. Polish is regarded as an indicator of the quality of as diamond’s cut; it is graded as either Ideal, Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair or Poor.

3. Caret.  Is your product full-featured?  Is there a lot of value?  Consider building it out to offer more for the money.  But listen closely to customers before launching into your build-out program.  Find out what they want, and add only those features.

4. Cut.  There a dozens of ways to present a product (i.e. cut the product features for use).  Choose an ugly one, and customers will look elsewhere.  They want new ways to approach their problems.  After all, they have exhausted all the conventional wisdom, and are looking to you to solve the real jawbreakers.  Do it, and they will reward you.

–ray

Blogs, wikis, and social networks top the list for collaboration tools among project team professionals, right?  After all, they bring the entire team together in ways nobody ever thought possible.  But that’s not what the latest Ziff Davis study found.  In fact, “shared project management tools” was in the top ten, up there with simple old email.  Didn’t know that?  Check out this article by Allan Alder at CIO Insite.

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Research/Collaboration-Unlocking-the-Power-of-Teams/

It’s buried on page five, but the zinger quote below tells it all.  Check out the chart on page 5 too.  It tells us that products like Standard Time® really are important!  They are the ones bringing project teams together.  “Shared project management systems” ranked at #8, while “MySpace” was at #27, just above “None of the above.”

Shared project management systems, workflow systems, real-time document collaboration tools and knowledge management systems are considered more important than any Web 2.0 technology: They are widely used by project teams and, to a slightly lesser extent, by co-workers engaged in business processes.

I’d like to see the list of collaboration tools you find useful for your project team.  If you are not using Standard Time, what are you using?  I’d like to hear!

–ray

Project phase: A series of project tasks grouped together by time frame.

Project phases help you complete a portion of your project before moving on to other activities.  If your project is so big that it needs phases, good for you!  It probably means you have many resources assigned to it, and you need to break things up to manage them effectively.  This is not always so, but often the case.

Both Microsoft Project® and Standard Time® let you create phases or breakdowns.  They are called by many names: summaries, subprojects, subsystems, or just plain phases.  Anyway you look at it, they are project breakdowns that represent groups of tasks lumped into a time frame.  In other words, all the tasks are expected to be completed within a close proximity of time.

To create a summary task in Microsoft Project, simply click the task under it, and then click the Indent toolbar button.  That will cause the task above it to become bold, signifying that it summarizes the tasks below it.  As you add more tasks to the summary, certain fields (like start and finish dates) will roll up to the summary level.  You can collapse the summary to hide detail.  In Standard Time, these tasks are displayed on the timesheet.

–ray

This topic (how to set a deadline for an MS Project task) is so simple, it’s hardly worth mentioning.  But, it might be good to review.  It’s just another little piece of information that might help scheduling projects.

To create a task deadline:

1. Double-click on a task  (the Task Info dialog box appears)
2. Click the Advanced tab
3. Click the Deadline dropdown
4. Choose a date, sometime after the task finish date

These steps allow you to set a deadline that the task should be finished by.  A small arrow is displayed in the Gantt column at that date.  The image below shows what it looks like.

Arrow indicating task deadline
(normally before the task finish date)

If your task gets bumped (presumably because of linked predecessors) the finish date may go beyond the deadline.  When this happens, a small red indicator is shown next to the task name.  The image below shows what it looks like.  Browse your mouse over it to see a tool tip explaining the reason.

Deadline indicator

–ray

A huge number of projects, usually small ones, die ugly drawn-out deaths simply from distraction - and nobody knows.  Yeah, people get distracted and forget them!  It’s true, I’ve seen it happen dozens of times.  Here’s how it happens.

First, the big boss decides he wants something.  A new product or policy.  A new way of doing things.  An improvement in procedure.  He’s sure it will save the company money, so he launches a new initiative (a project) to get it.  He assigns it to one of his people, and expects to hear some status in a while.  FIRST MISTAKE!

The employeee may have no strong allegence to the new initiative, and gets distracted and never completes it.  He’s bored, and doesn’t want to mess with it.  The boss forgets he asked, and the project is effectively dead.  Every seen that happen?  That what I thought…  So, how do you fix it?

Tip #1: Document it.
If you don’t write down your project initiatives, they can easily be sabotaged by bored employees.  If there is no record of them, employees can safely ignore them without any consequences.  And they will.

Tip #2: Don’t pile on.
Giving your employees too many projects means they won’t do them when asked.  I’ve seen managers throw so many projects at employees that they simply ignore them until asked later.  If the big boss never asks, he must not want it badly enough.  They simply wait him out and deal with only the important ones when he asks.  Yikes!

Tip #3: Reduce the chain links
If Joe is to do the job, but needs input from Britnney and Travis, and they can’t get to it until Keyshawn obtains his status from Lisa who gets her materials from Joe, you may never get anything.  Don’t believe it happens?  It does.  There are sometimes so many links in the project chain that the effort fizzles out, simply because one person can’t get what they need.  Of course, they never bother to find out why, but you need to realize this can happen.

Bottom line: you need a project champion who walks everything through its paces.  If you’re the big boss, that may be you.  No champion?  Well… chances are the project will die of distraction.

–newshirt

Are you the leader of a project team?  Or do you hope to be someday?  Here’s a tip for managing people.  Love what you do.  And show it.

If you are in leadership, you will not have success until you love your work so much it’s contagious.  People need to see you digging into every aspect of it.  And digging hard.  They simply will not follow until they see the passion.  Are you uncovering new ideas and methods?  Finding improvements in managing projects?  Making it look fun?

Think of things through your team member’s eyes.  Do they see someone who can take their careers to the next level?  Sure, you may be a good ol’ boy, but do they feel compelled to follow you?  Fight for new business?  Endure the pain for the pleasure of success?  Not if they don’t see you doing those things.

The point I’m making is that managing teams, projects, and products is more about leading by example than begin one of the gang.  Be a person they want to emulate.

–ray

Contraint type: A task scheduling option that determines how project tasks interact with each other with respect to dates.

Microsoft Project allows you to set constraint types for each task.  Using task constraints can really bugger up a project, if you don’t know what you are doing.  Ever hear of scheduling conflicts?  Consider using deadlines instead.  I feel constraints can be useful when used in moderation.  But most managers do not need to dive this deeply into task management.  Why?

Most projects change rapidly from day to day.  Because of this, you may find yourself fiddling with esoteric task options, only to find that they become irrelevant next week when the schedule changes.  That’s where deadlines can be simpler.

Here are the task constraints MS Project offers:

1. As Late As Possible (default in a project scheduled from the finish date)
2. As Soon As Possible (default in a project scheduled from the start date)
3. Finish No Earlier Than
4. Finish No Later Than
5. Must Start On
6. Must Finish On
7. Start No Earlier Than
8. Start No Later Than

 Clearly, these options control the behaviour of tasks that are linked together.  Let’s say you chose the “Start No Later Than” constraint type.  In this case, you would be required to supply a date that the task cannot start after.  Let’s say you chose August 1st.

A scheduling conflict can occur if a predicessor task causes your task to start after August 1st.  Schedules change so frequently that this is likely to happen.  Actually that can be a good thing.  Consider it an alert that something has gone wrong with your project.  If your project slips so badly that these contraints become activated, it can alert you to deeper problems witn your project team.

–ray

I suppose it’s no surprise, but I for one, perform better when under the influence of inspiration.  My projects just flow when I am driven with excitement to complete them.  I don’t even have to ignore the boring aspects of the project; I just fly right over them as if they didn’t exist.  But without that inspiration, it’s sometimes a drag.

Okay, that’s me.  Now, how do you get the entire team motivated like that?  All at once?

Clearly the answer lies in goals that every one shares.  Fame, fortune, accomplishment?  It’s different with every project, and every person.  The key is to find common ground that everyone can get behind.

I remember the old MacPaint program on the early Macintosh’s.  All the author’s names were in the About box.  Those guys met in Andy Herxtfeld’s home, and pounded out the next great thing: Fatbits!  But there’s no simple formula for every project team and every project.  In other words, you cannot simply offer comp time or best-employee certificates for every job.

Years later, names in the About Box isn’t enough.  Been there, done that.

Eventually, people grow weary of simple incentives.  They need big “life incentives” that mean something to their lives.  They need to know their efforts are making a difference in the world.  That people recognize their work.  Yes, it takes that much.  Nobody wants a shallow life.

How do you inspire your team, all at once, to change the world?

–newshirt

In this post we’ll discuss how to split tasks in Microsoft Project.  In other words, how to break tasks into segments representing the exact times work will be performed.

Microsoft Project tasks do not necessarily need to start on one day, and continue until the task is complete.  They can be broken up into segments.  In other words, work can be performed in a discontinguous fashion.  For instance, 16 hours in one week, 16 hours in the next week, and a final 4 hours the following week.  This technique is illustrated below.  Steps to perform it as also included.

Split bar, showing each segment of work

Split hours, in Task Usage view

I must warn you…  I feel this is a micro-management technique.  It can be good to define exactly when the work will be performed, right down to the hour, but do you really want to spend your time doing that?  That’s better left to the discretion of engineers who will actually be doing the work.

Follow these steps to split Microsoft Project tasks:

1. Create a new task in the Gantt view (See the View menu)
2. Right-click in the header area, and choose Insert Column
3. Insert the Work column (it represents the planned work for a task)
4. Enter 10 hours for the Work
5. Choose View, Task Usage
6. Notice the number of hours for each day (this is the time you will work on the task)
7. Skip a few days, and enter some additional hours into the Task Usage view
8. Choose View, Gantt Chart to return to the preview view
9. Notice that the Gantt bar has been split to show the new hours

–ray

This is a little reminder that we all need from time to time.  I’m not going to get too depressing here, but I attended a close family members funeral last week.  As I talked with family and friends at the service I was reminded of what’s truly important in life.

We all know this, but rarely stop and do anything about it.  We get caught up in the daily grind and focus on the latest hurdle at work.  Well I’m here to say that last year I said forget it, and took my family on a 10 day vacation!  We spent time at the beach and doing a whole lot of nothing.  During this vacation I got to spend time with my aunt whose funeral I attended last week.  I remember chasing and catching fireflies with my children in her backyard, priceless.  Jeez, I’m a city boy raised in So-Cal.  And during that time I got to ride on my grandpa’s tractor around the old family farm.  I am so glad we took that vacation!  These are just a few memories that no one can pull from my mind.  It was relaxing and it was more fun than I ever thought it could be. 

Life will always bring excuses as to why we can’t slow down to enjoy time with family and friends.  We Americans work harder than any people on earth.  Yet we ought to recharge and relax once in a while.  What are one or two weeks out of the year?  For me its a lifetime of memories and more fun than I ever dreamed.

I just got off a conference call where the customer lamented that project tracking (in his organization) is an albatross.  E.g. too much work!

His company had been using an Excel spreadsheet, and wanted to switch to Standard Time® for project tracking.  Their spreadsheets had grown so large that grooming them consumed too much time.  His statements really got me thinking.

Every project has two components: doing the work, and managing the work.  That’s no big secret.  This person was lamenting about the management part, and wanted to know how Standard Time® would improve that.

Unfortunately, the answer is not in the tool, but in his organization.  Questions arose regarding the size of his teams, their self-sufficiency, and how granular his tasks needed to be.  We agreed that his tasks were too granular - too small.  He had been trying to micro-manage everything, and that was driving him crazy.

Let’s face it, project tasks change frequently.  It’s nice to document every task you’ll work on, but in practicallity, some well-defined buckets could catch all the task work.  Each time log could describe the work performed, and you’d still have some basic tasks to report on.  Simplicity is best.