May 2008 - Posts

• Get your fudge ratio

  Not, it's not how much fudge you can cram in yourself before you start feeling icky (although I wish!). The fudge ratio, as explained in this post from LifeHacker, reflects how good you are as estimating the time required to accomplish something. To get your fudge ratio, you must compare your time estimates with your actual times. Here's an example: You estimate it will take 1 hour to implement changes to the company's website. It turns out Murphy had his way and it took you 2 hours to implement the changes, meaning 200% of the estimated time. You estimate it will take 2 hours to correct a database query, but you found the error faster than you though you would and it only took 30 minutes to fix it. In this case, your actual time is 25% of the estimated time. You estimate it will take 5 hours to design a new application logo, but you forgot about the approval process and it ended up taking 8 hours, 160% of the estimated time. If you keep tracking estimate VS actual time, you will be able to get an average fudge ratio. In the example above, if we make an average of the individual fudge percentages (200, 25, 160), we end up with the fudge ratio of  128%, or 1.28. When you know your fudge ratio, as the LifeHacker post explains, you can pad your estimates accordingly. This will help you give more accurate estimates. The problem: most of us aren't very good at taking notes Let's face it: most of us will start with good intentions of keeping a spreadsheet somewhere with the estimated numbers and the actual numbers. Unfortunately, as deadlines get closer and the task pile keeps getting higher, we'll forget to keep the spreadsheet up to date and we will never be able to accumulate enough data to get a good fudge ratio. Most of us, however, use a project management system. Most project management systems already include estimated times for tasks. As you work on your task in AceProject, you can log your time for that task very easily: Fill out a time sheet at the end of the week Add to your time sheet directly from the task Just start a timer. To get your fudge ratio, all you have to do is go in My Office and customize your task list with the Actual % Done field included: With a task list like this, you can automatically see whether you tend to be optimistic with your estimates. Export your list to Excel, get an average from the Actual % Done and there you are. You have your fudge ratio. Now that you have it, don't be afraid fudge things up Now that you've got your fudge ratio, use it. When you're making estimates, remember your fudge ratio and apply it. If we use our example's fudge ratio (1.28), when estimating a task to take 10 hours, you should put in 13 hours (10 multiplied by the fudge ratio of 1.28). This allows breathing space for Murphy's Law to affect your project. Posted May 30 2008, 08:47 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: time management, project management

• The eyes have a shorter (well, faster) path to the brain

  When planning a project, we usually try to schedule tasks from memory, trying to fit dates. And then, when something new has to be done and we try to fit it in the schedule. Gantt charts are not just a great way to report on the advancement of a project. They're a great planning tool. You can instantly see if there is a whole in someone's schedule to add a task. Visualize workload Just make a Gantt chart that shows someone's workload, across all projects. Maybe you would prefer to see it sorted by date, instead of by project? It certainly looks cleaner this way: With a chart like that, you instantly know if you can fit something else in Jane's schedule. In this example, we can see that Jane has some free time towards the end of this week, and in the week of June 8. Create a project visually Or, when setting up a new project, work directly from the Gantt chart. When you add tasks directly form the Gantt, it makes it very easy to organize your project. Also nice is the visuals of task dependencies. If a task in the project needs to be moved, all its dependents will all move with it, which makes it easy to see the impact of changing a date. Visual is better In the end, it all comes do the fact that our eyes are better at understanding something quickly. With abstract concepts (like time), it's hard to have a bird-eye view of the project, unless it's put in visual form. Posted May 28 2008, 09:16 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: Gantt charts

• Going global and the calendar

  Today is Memorial Day in the USA. In Canada, the May holiday was Victoria Day, on May 19th. Since a good part of our business is done with organizations outside of Canada, we have to pay attention to holidays happening in other countries. This means a slower day today, but it also meant someone needed to field the phones last Monday, even though it was Victoria Day. As the planet grows smaller and project teams can easily spread across continents, it's becoming increasingly difficult to manage people the traditional way. For the team to work well, one cannot assume everyone knows most people don't work today in the USA, while in the rest of the world, it's business as usual. While there might be a danger to loose one's culture and individuality in the globalization, I think there is another way to see this. It's not loosing one's identity, but rather enriching one's world, gaining different ways of seeing things and getting things done.  Managing across cultures requires openness from all parties. This is harder than it looks. It's no fun being the one who is working while everyone is off enjoying spring. However, it's good to be the one who's taking the day off when everyone has to go to work.  I think managing international teams is like turning the tables on yourself. It can be scary, but it can also be fun!  Posted May 26 2008, 02:18 PM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, teamwork

• It's about trust

  It's easy to say you trust someone. It's harder to put it into practice. Let's say to assign a task to someone on your team. When the teammate flags that task as complete, do you trust her to have completed it, or do you go behind her back and check it?  While there are tasks that should be double-checked (after all, this is why there is code review and sofware testing!), many tasks do not require to be rechecked after they are completed. Trusting your team means taking the risk that, once in a while, a task will need to be reopened. This is the price of empowering your team. Jason from 37signals made a very good point in this post: "When you trust people to make a reasonable decision, they’ll usually make one. When you require everything someone writes to go through an approval process they’ll probably write less and be less interesting. We don’t want people to be afraid to write or afraid to think." The question is: can you afford not to trust your team? A team that is not trusted will loose a lot of its creativity, proactive attitude and overall dynamics. It condemns the team to be average. What's so great about being average?  Posted May 23 2008, 09:34 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, teamwork

• AceProject is skin-deep, and we like that!

  AceProject 4.5 introduced more flexibility for our clients to brand their project management system to fit their corporate image. Before AceProject 4.5, our clients could upload their own logo to replace AceProject's, and put their own company name in place of AceProject in the page title. Now, with AceProject's skinning feature, you can choose the color scheme to use in your account!  More than that: if you don't like our predefined skins (Forest, Vista, Cherry, Sunset, Flame, Chocolate, Navy Blue, Classic Blue), you can always change the colors one by one: As our President, Daniel, explains it: "AceProject is often a tool that must integrate with our client's other tools and Intranet. With the skinning feature, AceProject can fit with the corporate image. On our end, the skinning feature closes the gap to customize AceProject's interface, since now all visual elements can be configured." How skinning was implemented in AceProject Michel, our graphic designer, explains: "We started with a comprehensive review of all the style sheets (CSS) and images used in AceProject. We had to make the shift from static visuals to dynamic ones. In fact, each tag now has a specific ASP tag with a color variable that changes automatically when the skin is modified. As for the images, I had to recreate a few hundred in seven color combinations, one for each new skin. The technical challenge of becoming skin deep For Michel, the challenge in implementing the skinning feature in AceProject 4.5 was the sheer number of images to process. It wasn't only about redoing every image for each skin, but also about deciding whether the image itself needed to be different from skin to skin. "In the end, it was not a simple job of doing everything seven times. We had to stop and think about each image and decide whether it would change with the skin," says Michel. Taking pride in our skin Michel is very proud that AceProject now offers the choice of changing the interface colors.  As a graphic designer, it's important for him to have some control on the interface of the tools he uses. Sylvain, at Customer Support, agrees: "This feature gives users more flexibility. We let them choose the colors THEY prefer instead of imposing the ones WE like. Whether you apply one of pre-defined themes or simply change the color of that one element that bothers you, it's up to you, you're the boss." Posted May 21 2008, 09:43 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: business, product development

• Do what it takes and your customers will love you?

  What does it take for your customers to love you? A great product? Great service? We can go further and ask: do you want all your customers to love you? Without exception? How much are you willing to do get that result? It would take a lot of effort for all your customers to love you. Even if you have the best product and the best service, there would still be customers who would not love you. I prefer to see things differently: make a product you love to use and like-minded customers will love you. There is just too much diversity in this world to aim for 100% love from all your customers. Furthermore, setting unrealistic goals online breeds failures. And while one failure can be cathartic and motivating for a team, multiple failures are just demoralizing.  How much energy are you willing to spend to make your customers love you?     Posted May 16 2008, 09:08 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: business, customer service

• Surviving a failed project

  I read an excellent post from Guy Kawasaki's blog, How to change the world. The post was an interview with Jerry White, the co-founder of Survivor Corps.  The interview focused on the art of survival. How do you go on after a tragedy, how do you move away from that event? It made me think about the aura that failure can give you. When you project fails, you can surrender to the failure or move on, determined to make the next project a success. You can also choose to become a victim of that failure, a let it taint the next project with defeatism. So, let's apply Jerry's recipe for surviving a failed project.  Face facts. The project has failed. There is nothing that can be done about it now. Don't try to blame circumstances or other people or anything that takes the failure away from you. You may not be the sole architect of that failure, but finding reasons to escape responsibility is not the way to go. Choose life, not death. Jerry talks about creating options for a positive future. Once you've accepted the failure of the previous project, don't let it slow you down. Let go of that failure and move forward. Reach out. Maybe you need to learn some new skills for project management? Maybe you need to improve how you manage your team, or how you manage expectations, or simply how you manage your time. Training sessions can only help you improve yourself, if only by giving you a confidence boost. Getting a mentor or a life coach can be beneficial too. Get moving. Get your hands on a new project. See it as an opportunity to start fresh. You can apply what you learned in your training or mentoring sessions. Most of all, working on a new project will motivate you. It will change your outlook, from being the one whose project just failed, to being the one whose new project will succeed. Give back. You're not only one who's failed before. When someone else has a failure on their score sheet, don't turn your back on them. You can become their mentor. You can offer them some guidance to move away from the failure and become better at project management.  My take on it: it's about looking ahead Recovering from a failure requires that you look ahead of you. You can't move forward when you're always revisiting the past. And if you're constantly thinking of that past failure, other people will see that in you too. The aura of failure is not put on you by the others around them, you're the one keeping it there. Focus on how good you can be.    Posted May 14 2008, 10:18 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management

• Living in the present: it's easier to keep promises this way

  I was reading this excellent post about being taken seriously and it made me realize how important it was to product management. The first element of David's post is about telling people what you have done instead of what you will do. It seems like common sense at first, but how many times have you talked about your product's future features? How great it is going to be? What about now? Your product should be great already. If it's sucessful now, it's because of what it is in the present, and not because of what it may become in the future. I have too often seen sales people become caught up in the future of the product, and selling the product's next version instead of selling the product's current version. In a situation like this, the only thing that can happen is a sales rep who has to go back to the client and recant her promises. She will look bad to the client, and the company's image will also suffer. Mind you, this is not exclusive to the sales team. Product managers also tend to live in the future, and will contaminate the sales team with their vision. It's OK to have vision. However you have to be careful not to translate this vision into promises that cannot be kept. What a product manager will want in her next product release may differ greatly from what actually comes out with the product's final version. And the product manager's enthousiasm is contagious. Working on both the marketing and sales sides, I can understand how tempting it is to sell what's going to be in the software. So many clients will tell you "I would buy it if only it had this (insert feature here)."  The fact is, there will always be something missing on the product. You will be better off learning to sell the product as it is now, than always living int he future and being disappointed when features get dropped from the release. Posted May 12 2008, 01:51 PM by Karine with no comments Filed under: product management, sales

• PITAs and projects

  PITA is for pain in the a**. People who are PITAs really put a dent in any project. How can you detect a PITA? He/She focuses only on the negative aspects of the projects. What's going wrong, what's late, what hasn't been done correctly, etc. However, the PITA is not interested in solving those problems. All the PITA is interested in is to whine about the problem, and possibly blame somebody or something. A PITA also tries to get attention like children do: by throwing tantrums, bullying and manipulating others around him or her. When you habe a PITA in your team, it can be a weight on everybody's shoulders. It can significantly impair the project's progress. How do you deal with the PITAs in your project team? You must remember that PITAs are trying to get energy from you. Their screaming and crises and drama and blaming are all about getting people to feel sorry for them or agree with them or follow them in their blaming mission. As long as you're playing along, you're encouraging this behavior from your PITA. Now, if the PITA is the project manager, it means the whole team is in trouble. It's harder to ignore the project manager PITA and work around him or her. However, it can still be done. If you don't give in to the PITA's behaviors, he or she may realize it's not working and try a different, les painful approach to managing the team. If the PITA is a team member, it's easier to work around this person. A good way to confront the PITA is to ask the question: What should we do about it? Often, PITAs are not interested in solutions. After all, if the problem goes away, what are they going to complain about. Also, asking for a solution changes the mindset of the team, from focusing on the problem to focusing on the solution. It's also a good idea to learn to build resistance to PITA behavior. The PITA is not working specifically against you, but against everyone in their environment.  Watch out for PITAs around you Whenever you have an opportunity to change teams or bring someone new in the team, keep and eye out for PITAs. It's easier to avoid having them in your team than getting rid of them once they are in.  Posted May 09 2008, 09:23 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, teamwork

• Are you proactive AND reactive?

  When working on a project, do you try to think about what could go wrong or do you wait for the problem to manifest itself before fixing it? When looking back on your career, did you try to see or create opportunities for yourself and yor organization, or did you trust life to send you the right challenges? When managing a product, do you try to anticipate where your users will have issues, or do you fix those issues as they are reported? Does it have to be either/or?   Think ahead: be proactive  There are numerous benefits to being proactive. It avoid problems down the road. It minimizes the damages a problem could cause. It makes you, your team and your business look good. It's very trendy to be proactive. After all, it makes sense to solve the cause of potential problems before they spawn actual problems. However, sometimes being proactive makes you spend too much energy on a potential problem which may not have the estimated impact. Sometimes, by trying to look so hard into the future, you end up neglecting the present. A good way to be proactive when developing a new product is to look at the problems reported with previous version or even with the competition. Even though being proactive is about looking into the future and preventing problems, it can also be about learning from your mistakes and working to avoid repeating them. For example, when we detect a problem with AceProject's hosted accounts, we will send the fix to all our source code clients, even though they may not be affected by the problem. Just covering all bases.   Think now: be reactive Being reactive had a bad reputation these days. It's seen as slow and not customer-centric. Waiting is not popular in 2008. However, going ahead of the customer's needs has its limits. Sometimes, no one could have guessed event would unravel in a certain way. Or that someone would use the product in that specific way.  Sometimes, only one person will have that problem.  It's all about fixing the problem. If there is no problem, there is nothing to fix. In terms of customer satisfaction, fixing someone's problem may make you rank higher in their minds, because you fixed it. No because the product was perfect. Not because you foresaw every possible delay in the project. Not because you guessed when the time was perfect to send you resume. But because you were quick to react. At Websystems, we make a point of fixing customer issues as quickly as possible, even if it's a small problem experienced by only one account. It's not the customer's fault she's doing something unique with AceProject. It's our responsibilty to ensure that AceProject works correctly for her too.  The curve balls are always there No matter how proactive you are, life will always throw you curve balls. Being reactive cannot be avoided. Reacting quickly and reacting well when a situation arises is as important as being able to see things coming. Posted May 07 2008, 09:15 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: business, project management

• Harness your team's disgruntledness

  Often disgruntled teams are seen as a negative thing: people are unhappy, their productivity is low and they won't be willing to go the extra mile for their project. A nice bag a lemons, don't you think? How about turning those lemons into lemonade, then? Disgruntled workers are great agents of change. They are unhappy about they way things are now in the project. This means they will be more open to new ways of working. Maybe they are unhappy because they feel isolated and not informed about the rest of the project. A project management tool where everyone can contribute and know what's happening can be presented to the team as a way to get the information they so crave.  Maybe the team feels overworked and thinks management is insensitive to their needs. With a project management tool's time tracking features, they will be able to prove how much they are working on their projects. They can even track how accurate time estimates are to complete their tasks. On the one hand, you have a team working with a tool that can help them solve their problems. On the other hand, you get metrics from the project management system, so you can prove them right (or wrong).  Harness the energy When people are unhappy about something, their negative energy (lemons) can be turned into a drive for change (lemonade). And people who feel they have some control over their environment are generally happier in their jobs. And happy people work more, better and smarter. Posted May 05 2008, 09:00 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, teamwork

• Make meetings shorter

  Most of us have been in meetings that drag on forever: it seems nothing useful is said, and instead people are just repeating information everyone knows already. It seems like a waste of time. Everybody dreams of having meetings that focus on the important stuff, what requires attention and decisions that need to be made. Especially in time-sensitive projects (aren't they all?), no one has time to waste in meetings. Harness the power of reports Instead of listing everything that needs to be done on the project, why don't you simply focus on what needs to be discussed? Late tasks and tasks that have been worked on in the last week, for example. On order to do this without forgetting a task, simply 2 reports in AceProject: tasks with a due date in the past, and tasks with a last update in the same week. With those two reports, you'll be able to only see the tasks that need attention. You can export these reports to Excel, print them or simply display AceProject on the conference room's projector screen. This provides a simple working list to follow in the meeting. And since all the info is entered directly on the task, no need to rehash it.   These simple reports will greatly speed up your meetings - and free more time for doing actual work   Posted May 02 2008, 09:32 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, reports