Project Rescue Abstract

ProjectRescueAbstract.md

Title

Project Rescue 9-1-1

Abstract

Your perfectly crafted and meticulously planned project is behind schedule with a ballooning budget. The list of problems grows as developers are not able to hit estimates and stakeholders are frustrated by the slow progress, number of bugs and lack of project controls. At this stressful time, you need strategies for rescuing the project.

In this session, I'll walk through approaches to address common causes of project failure and how to anticipate potential issues with software projects before they reach the 9-1-1 rescue stage. While we can't always prevent a project from becoming a disaster, this session will provide proven approaches to minimize the damage and get the project to done.

Outline

Learning Objectives - Participants will:

1. Anticipate issues with projects before they reach the rescue 9-1-1 stage.
2. Indentify seveal approaches to address common causes of projecte failure.

Issues

1. Project Tracking is off
   • Behind schedule
   • Over budget
2. Scope Creep/change
3. Frustration from stakholders
   • Team
   • Business
   • Client
4. Lack of understanding from team
   • Lack of clear goals
   • Contributions not understood how they align with the big picture
   • Don't know what the business goal is
5. Poor Communication
6. Team Dynamics
   • Best team is the team you have

Case Study/Examples

• Pineapple Project in Whitehall
• Document management downtown
• Calculate balance

Approaches

1. Don't add more people to a project which is behind (Fred Brookes)
   • Unless you can carve off tasks which do not require context
     • DevOps Pipeline
     • Work item management
2. Connect tasks to project goal / recommunicate goals to team
3. Find opportunities to build team
   • Snack table
   • Team lunches
   • War Room
   • Pairing
   • Happy Hour
   • Standups
4. Identify work styles and skills, rearrange assignment to align with skills
   • Senior rockstar, cannot be interrupted
   • Juniors which need guidance
   • Mids which can provide tacticle advice
5. Create Specialization
   • Core parts of the system should be owned by sub-team
   • Align cross-over for largest portions of system
6. Communicate with stakeholder on their terms, tailor messages
   • Ubiquitous language
   • Talk in terms of business priorities to business
   • Each participant in project has a main concern, speak to that concern
     • Business Efficiency of process, performance, UI sleek, finance - money, communications - story
     • Developers - time dedicated to project
7. Set incremental goals to show progress
   • Track it
   • Show value
8. Risk Based Prioritization
   • Identify Project Business value risk
   • Technology risk
   • Schedule risk
9. Move - Analysis Paralysis
   • All the work to not make a wrong decision
   • Use your business value as a guiding star
   • Make a step assess and move foward
   • The only sure fire thing is if you don't move the project will never be done!