The untold experiences that help keeping your workflow smoothly run (according to the experts)

Project managers have many factors to concern in order to secure the smooth in their project workflow. These 2 shared cases bring you the untold real experiences of how to make that happen.

Carrie Leder Nunemaker

About the Interviewee: Carrie Leder Nunemaker is a project manager at Arkansas Supreme Court, who has more than 8 years of experiences as an IT project manager. (Visit Carrie’s LinkedIn here).

As project managers, we are trained to identify risks early in the project process. Each project brings a unique set of risks to the game. However, there are a few risks that I find continually plague the average PM.

Resources and customer expectations seem to niggle their way into most projects.

1. Resources factor

Even the largest companies can be resource constrained. Most project managers do not have the luxury of resources sitting on the sidelines waiting to be chosen as though we were back in middle school gym class.

In the instances when this miracle does occur, it seems the project pipeline magically moves from famine to feast overnight quickly creating a resource deficit. Suddenly everyone is off the sidelines and running at full speed away from your resource deprived project.

In those instances when project resources are available, we must determine if they have the proper skillset to perform the required work.

The project requirements can often result in shuffling resources around to accommodate the maximum number of projects without regard for individual team members.

With resource availability comes the next concern which is “on the road” time.

Many projects have requirements that require resources to travel to a client’s facility and perform some type of work. This onsite time can be spent on activities ranging from consultative to implementation work.

Regardless of what type of work the team member is performing while onsite, the constraint lies in how long we expect our team members to be away from home at any given time.

This is a fine line.

Some team members sign on knowing that they may be traveling a significant portion of the time for their role.

However, when the weeks run consecutively for months on end and their personal or family time becomes non-existent, there are risks to employee morale and attrition that can be detrimental to the company’s ability to complete project work.

2. Customer Expectation factor

The second common issue is customer expectations.

In many organizations the sales team may not involve the project or delivery teams until after customer expectations have been set.

This problem can be highlighted when the sales process is a long and not well documented.

Back and forth discussions between the end users and the sales team regarding expectations or product features may not be communicated well, or at all, to the team delivering the final product.

While these project risks are not likely to be resolved for any of us soon, understanding they exist and planning any mitigation strategies can reduce the risk associated with them in the short term.

Terry Woodward

About the Interviewee: Terry Woodward, who has been a Corporate Project Manager, a Director of Data Services and a Development Manager for SOF Inc., with the total 30 years of Tech experiences. (Visit Terry’s LinkedIn here).

The factors that are of most concern in pretty much every project across the board have to do with the “unknowns” that may not be initially visible when the project is quoted or even started.

With experience, it is possible to produce reasonable assumptions about progress with territory that is familiar. However, in a complex software project, it is much more difficult to anticipate the unknowns that appear during the course of the project.

These “unknowns” may take the form of new technologies, where new ground must be broken during the project or technology upgrades, like a new vendor software release that has bugs or deprecated functions that impact the project.

It may also be an unplanned absence by a team member or a change in deadline for the project due to larger market or company conditions.

An example of this challenge occurred when managing a large CRM implementation with customization that announced the release of a new major version of software, when we were half way through the project.

We were monitoring the development roadmap and new of the upcoming release but what unveiled itself as an unknown (surprise) was that with the release, the version of PHP the servers were running on also needed to be upgraded, and when upgrading it had some backwards compatibility issues with some of the plugins we were dependent on.

One of the strategies for handling unknowns/surprises that has seemed to work is to give attention to the more difficult parts of a project early on to flush out visibility of the unknowns.

In the CRM project, we set up a parallel test server to install the CRM upgrades, and when bugs were discovered we wrote our own patches to vendor plugins to suffice until official releases were available. By tackling this as early as possible in the project we were able to adapt and still meet the project deadlines.

Another strategy to better manage project unknowns is to:

have senior developers with broad experience “prototype” solutions in new development territory, and then hand off the prototypes to the less experienced developers to work out into the structured development standards the company uses.

The senior developers will often spot potential danger areas or areas needing early attention due to deep experience working with complex systems. This two-step pairing often provides a more predictable path through a project.

Wrapping it up, in order to create a more predictable and manageable outcome, I recommend you consider these 2 following simple steps:

• Focus early on the complex parts of an application to provide time to adapt to unknowns
• Bring experience in for prototypes to expose many of the hidden gotchas in a project

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