Learnings to survive Long Projects
In Passei Direto we decided to rebuild all we have created so far. That was the Refactoring Project, which made it possible to expand our market.
During this 6 month project we had some rituals and leanings that helped us succeed that might be useful if you’re going to have a long project.
1. Organization
Timeline (Project Schedule)
It is really hard to know the project’s total duration in the beginning. The schedule starts to be more accurate once the project really starts.
However, we need to have an estimate to be able to create a timeline, organize tasks, and provide a concrete plan.
Each team made their detailed schedule (Micro Schedule) and we also had a Macro Schedule with the 4 projects that were going on at the same time. This macro vision helped us detect problems and if necessary, dive into each team’s schedule to see what we could change.
Documentation
I am not a big fan of creating documentation because it can be something that you spend hours making and no one really uses it. Also, the documentation needs an owner who always updates it. In the startup environment that means constantly making changes.
However, in this project it was really useful for one main reason: there was one place that had all the decisions we made. In long projects, you will see how easy it is for you to forget all the things you and your team have discussed and decided.
2. Alignment
Short meeting to make decisions
When the teams begin coding, some issues we had not anticipated appear. Some decisions would affect the other teams.
In this scenario, we scheduled meetings to listen to different point of views. If it was a business/product decision, the PM was responsible for the final outcome. If it was related to Tech, the TM’s (Tech Managers) were responsible.
All decisions made in this meeting would be recorded in our official project documentation.
Weekly Checkpoints
Something that really helped the synchronization of multiple long projects was a weekly checkpoint that we had every Thursday. In this meeting were the Product Manager, Tech Managers and Prod/Tech Heads.
This meeting was really straightforward: we all opened our project macro schedule and each team talked about any updates to the schedule from last week. If the due date was going to be pushed earlier or later, they gave an explanation as to why and everybody knew how and if it would impact their teams.
At the end of each meeting the minutes were sent to everyone.
Retrospectives
Long projects are really stressful and you don’t have the small winnings that people need to keep motivation up (if you want to know more check this HBR Article).
There are no real small wins in a project that you deliver everything in one shot. Retrospectives serve as a team thermometer. You can understand better what are the most annoying things for your team and try to improve during the project. It is better for you to have people that complain than the the ones that are silent because you will never know what is really going on.
Product & Technology Teams have to be on the same boat rowing in the same direction.
3. Motivation
Vision reinforcement
We had moments when our teams were losing motivation or losing sight of the main purpose of this project.
To avoid this problem, it is important that the PM always reinforces the project vision through presentations and conversations.
In addition, it is important to do the same thing with other inner company departments because they rely on technology for their projects. We were having a lot of frustration from teams such as: marketing, customer service, content, and finance. This was only diminished when everybody was in the same room and we explained to all teams our road map so they could have a better understand of our workload and goal.
Keep Focused
During the project we had a lot of times where the team wanted to do something in another way. We allowed them to execute their tasks in the way they thought best: new methodology, new process, new components, etc.
What we noticed is that we lost speed and we lost focus on our delivery.
There are already so many variables that can go wrong during long projects that I recommend to keep it simple and keep focused.
Fixed Deploy Date
It is really hard to set a due date in the beginning. However, after 3 months of executing we needed to give a final date because teams were getting fatigued.
We set a due date and close to the launch, the PM (Product Managers) with the TM (Tech Managers) had to decide which features were not going to be included in our launch.
4. (EXTRA) Deal with surprises
Some tasks and events were not planned during our project and they appeared without warning.
Always leave room in the project schedule for surprises.
In our case, we lost a partnership and we had to remove one of our features. We asked other team members and even our Head of Engineering to code to deal with this unexpected event.
Below you can see a summary of all topics I talked about:
All the points mentioned in this article were possible because of our team members commitment. In the end, they are the most valuable part of any project we work on.
If you want to know more, please feel free to contact me.
