3 Tips to Avoid Most of Project Management Issues

It doesn't take much for a small web project to go off the rails. We've all seen it. The project can be moving along perfectly with the client and stake holders satisfied with the progress being made, and then, all of sudden, before you've even realised it, you're scratching your head wondering how it got to this point. It's a common issue in the web design industry. There's no secret remedy for combating these issues, rather a combination of planning, diligence and common sense will assist in preventing disastrous web project outcomes. Below are list of helpful tips for ensuring the project remains on track.

1. Yes, you still need a Project Initiation Document
   

   
   Just because it is small, doesn't mean planning is not required.
   The most important phase in the life cycle of a small web project is the Project Initiation Phase. All too regularly, people dive straight into the project, particularly when it is only relatively small, without the required planning. For some inexplicable reason, people will not reserve the necessary planning for a smaller job merely because it is not overly complex. Anyone who has managed a number of web projects will tell you that the small projects can be just as tricky as some of the bigger ones. So, with this in mind, it is critical to apply a methodical, well-thought-out approach to a web project of any size. A methodical approach begins with the Project Initiation Phase.

   Project Initiation Phase is when you determine why the project is happening, what the project is attempting to achieve and what are the key factors that define the project's success. One of the critical steps to a well-planned initiation phase is the development of a Project Initiation Document. This document is a collaborative effort between the web design team and the client. The purpose of the document is to ensure all those involved are in agreement on the scope of the project.

   The project initiation document ought to summarise:

   1. Key Objectives
      • A mission statement for the proposed site
      • Proposed site goals
      • Site KPIs
        
   2. Audiences
      • Identify your audience
      • User goals
      • User profiling
        
   3. Functionality
      
      
   4. Content
   
   

   While the Project Initiation Document is critical to the success of the project, it is advisable to keep it relatively concise. Another pitfall to no planning is too detailed planning.

2. Project Plan
   
   

   Start simple and then get more detailed.
   After the Project Initiation Document has been completed and all participants are in agreement on the scope, the next step to ensuring the project is moving in the right direction is to create a Project Plan. A project plan can take a variety of forms, depending on the nature of the project. It is unrealistic to plan the entire project in minute detail from day one, it just doesn’t happen. Web projects, regardless of size, evolve as discovery, user focus and design is undertaken. Keeping this point in mind, the project plan needs to start simple and then delve into more detail.

   Initially, the project plan is a basic extrapolation of the Project Initiation Document which stipulates the key deliverables of the project, a high-level timeline and the resources needed for the project’s execution.

   Once this plan has been documented, break-up the project into segmented items of work, such as strategy, pre-production, design, development and deployment. In each of these segmented items of work, specify mini milestones and designate a person to action each mini milestone. These mini milestones need to be documented into a working chart or spreadsheet with a dead line, so that the project continues to progress.

3. Risk Management Plan
   
   Don’t risk not doing it.
   At the beginning of the project it is necessary to outline any risks to the project’s development. All projects, even the small ones, have risks associated with delivery in the specified time frame, budget and specification. Risks can be anything from the time needed to complete the project, to the technology being used, to the client’s expectations and understanding of the job.

   Some points to consider when developing the risk management plan:

   1. Rank each potential risk in order of its likelihood
   2. Determine how damaging each risk is to the success of the project
   3. Outline how these risks will be mitigated
   4. Don’t be afraid to share the risks with the client. Transparency and communication is often the biggest hurdle for any web project

Summary
It is impossible to preempt everything that is going to occur during the development of a web project, however, by devoting the required time to planning during the Initiation Phase, working on a project plan and outlining the potential risks, there is a much greater chance of avoiding unexpected issues.

An article of James Hinton from http://www.wiliam.com.au provides the most information of this article.

Teambuilding and Benefits

This is a word we hear a lot these days: ‘we need some kind of teambuilding activity’. But from our point of view, often the people saying it don’t really know what they mean.

It’s as if we all know that teams are good. We understand the sum of the parts thing, but we don’t quite know how to make a team work in the way we think we want it to.

When it comes to teambuilding, the very first question we have to ask is, what for? In other words, what are you building it to do?

Sometimes it can genuinely mean building the team: new people coming together, a change of roles, new expectations, sorting out difficulties or communication issues. All good things to prompt the need for teambuilding.

But sometimes it isn’t that at all.

For example, we were recently asked to run a teambuilding day for a group of people and almost as soon as we met them and started putting the programme together, we realised they were a very ‘built’ team already. That wasn’t the issue.

The issue was that their ‘output’ wasn’t what the company expected from them and so they (the company) thought if they had a teambuilding event the team would work better.

Uh uh. That’s not teambuilding. It is, however, team development. And increasingly, we find that when people talk about teambuilding that’s what they really mean.

Part of this whole process is learning about how teams work. And, get this – no matter what the books say (and there are plenty of them) - every single team is different: there is no model you can follow that will create the perfect team.

You’ll read that you need ideas people, drivers, completer-finishers, etc., etc., etc. And yes, possibly you do need a variety of ‘types’. But for our money, the ‘types’ are far less important than ensuring that your team knows why it exists and what its aims are.

So let’s look first at just exactly what being a team means. You might think that the very word ‘team’ is clear in and of itself: a group of people working towards shared goals. We wish it were that straightforward. As it isn’t, we thought we would unpick it a bit.

The common enemy

The most obvious kind of team that you’ll know about is a sports team. Everyone is on the same side trying to beat the opposition. They train together, get to understand how to make the most of each other’s skills, and when working well, they are able to fulfil the manager or coach’s strategy.

They know who their opposition is and they have very clear goals. Yes, there may be personality quirks and differences, but the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts.

However, it’s not quite so straightforward when it comes to work teams, though, is it? Personalities, which in a sporting context might get absorbed by the team for the good of the game, often take centre stage in the workplace.

The oddest thing of all, of course, is that it’s not always clear who the ‘opposition’ is. You’d think it would be the competition – whoever your closest corporate rival is. Unfortunately, far too often, the opposition turns out to be right at home base: another team or department, the ‘management’ or someone sitting right beside you.

Now the thing about ‘opposition’ is that it gives a common focus, a common ‘enemy’ if you will. Now that’s great if it’s productive. Creative ideas can pour out of a group when they have to figure out how to handle the competition.

However, when the common enemy is someone or some group or some department or a ‘them’ and ‘they’ are within the same company, then the results are divisiveness, gossip, complaining. The end result of this is of course a loss of productivity and people working against, not for each other.

Then it’s all about ‘them’ and ‘us’, with people running around using their energies to get more of ‘us’ to agree just what’s wrong with ‘them’. We see this in company after company after company – people are spending vast amounts of time and energy having a ‘go’ at each other rather than using that same amount of time and energy to make things work better.

This is one of the key reasons why ‘teambuilding’ is such a hot topic. People can easily recognise that something needs to be done, but they aren’t quite sure what.

What can be done?

They are right. Something does need to be done because there are real payoffs and advantages to being part of a well-functioning team. To begin with, it’s just pleasanter being around people who get on.

More importantly, real payoffs include:

• A feeling of identity
• On-going support
• Creative pooling of ideas
• Increased confidence
• Things tend to work better as a result of team effort
• You aren’t alone
• Goals that make sense
  

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, or if you do, so is everyone else in the team

So the first thing you have to ask yourself is this:

What kind of team are you?

These days we see a lot of ‘virtual’ teams – people who hardly ever see each other, or even work in the same office or even the same country.

Then there are teams that all sit in an open plan space and chat with each other all day as things arise.

There are teams where people sit in separate spaces and get together once a day/week/fortnight.

There are teams that seem to do all their communicating via e-mail or conference calls.

There are teams that work on projects together and others where people go off and do their own thing and come together every once in a while to report and bring everyone else up to date.

At PMTutor.Net, for instance, our ‘team’ consists of a group of freelance partners and associates who come into the office as and when, some full-time permanent staff who are at ‘base camp’ most of the time and a bunch of associates in training and support staff who we see when they are needed.

Everyone is however still a member of the PMTutor.Net team. What makes it a team are shared values, goals and objectives. And, of course, our old friend communication. Sometimes we fail abysmally, but a lot of the time we get it right; enough so, that people do feel part of this identity known as PMTutor.Net.

To work effectively you need agreement on exactly what sort of team you are: what the goals are, what each member's role is, who needs to work closely with whom, what the game plan should be. Sometimes it’s as simple as learning more about the people you work with, and sometimes it’s a whole lot more complicated, such as working through entrenched difficulties or defining how a long-distance team communicates.

So what is your team? The better you are at identifying what kind of team you are, the better you’ll be able to identify what it needs to work well. Yours doesn’t have to be a classic team. This is actually where many people get confused. They have a picture of what a team is supposed to be, but then find themselves part of something that doesn’t fit that picture.

Here are a couple of other things teams don’t have to be:

They don’t have to be a family.
People don’t have to be bosom buddies.
People don’t even have to like each enough to want to have dinner together.
Teams aren’t group therapy.
Teams can, on occasion, be any or all of those things.

It may still be a team; it just may not look like one. Whatever it looks like, however, it still has to be able to function well and achieve its goals.

Which leads us to the second question.

What do you want your ‘teambuilding’ event to achieve?

Teams are complex machines and it's not surprising that they malfunction occasionally or need re-alignment.

• Do you want people working better together?
• Do you want to set new team goals and agreements?
• Do you need to iron out communication difficulties that have crept in?
• Do you want a jolly – to reward the team for being terrific?
• Do you simply want to get everyone’s creative juices going and brainstorm new ideas?
• Do you need to set clear parameters and boundaries so everyone knows what’s expected of them?
• Do you want to inject some fresh enthusiasm and energy into a group that’s been working too hard and may have lost sight of the goal posts?
  

Perhaps the goals posts have moved and you need to let everyone know that.

A team event can encompass any and all of those questions.

The one thing that everyone recognises is that whatever you want to call it (building or development, event or away day), ‘it’ needs to be done away from the office environment. The idea is to slow things right down; to get away from e-mails, phone calls, questions and demands, people dropping by, being asked to pop into unscheduled meetings. It means getting away from all the day-to-day stuff that sometimes makes it hard to see what’s going on and what’s needed.

Once you know what you want your event to achieve, then you can decide what it’s going to look like. You can do the go-carting thing, the throwing people off Welsh mountains thing. You can have the cosy get-away in a country hotel thing. You can have it non-stop fun, be business focused or have a bit of both.

The key always is to ensure that your event has a positive effect on the morale, motivation, confidence and effectiveness of the team and its individual members.