October 2008 - Posts

• 5 ways to involve your client in your projects

  When managing a project, it’s important not to lose sight with who you’re working for. Your client is not always an actual customer. Not always the person who pays for the project, your client can also be the person who will use the product or service you are making. For example, if you’re reorganizing archives at your work, the client could be those who need to search the archives: administrative and customer service teams. It can be quite disheartening to deliver something that disappoints the client. After all, you worked hard on that project, and you would like people to be impressed. If you want to make sure your client is happy with your work, involve them from the start, and keep them involved all the way through. Start from a client request A project for the sake of a project is useless. Find something that someone needs, and do it. Most organizations have wish lists where clients or other employees contribute; they are a great starting place. Right from the start Even before you start planning your project, contact your clients and get them involved right away. It’s better to know right away what they really want than to have to change everything at the last minute. It also helps understand why they want things a certain way, and makes it easier to plan your project to meet those requirements. Meet often As you work on your project, you should get your clients’ input regularly. This will ensure that you are still on track, and enable you to adjust as necessary. Prove to your client that their comments are useful If your clients are involved at every step of the project, they must have a sense that their time is not wasted. That doesn’t mean you have to implement every change they request. It means that you should give them feedback on whether or not the request will be implemented, and if it won’t, why you took that decision. Make client signoff mandatory It’s easy for a client to say that they are happy with the project’s result, and then turn around and deny that they accepted it. Getting clients to sign-off on the project delivery makes them accountable. Before they sign, they will make sure that the project is really done to their satisfaction. Posted Oct 31 2008, 02:57 PM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, customer satisfaction

• The apple of frustration never gets eaten

  A while ago we went grocery shopping at a different shop than our usual place. It's surprising how we get used to a specific customer experience. Long story short, we were confronted with rules that seemed illogical in the purchasing of apples. It made our experience at this store negative, and we are very unlikely to shop there again. A few days later, we bought more apples from our regular store, and the experience seemed even better, because of the frustration we experienced at the other store. Which apples do you think were eaten first? We kept looking at the "apples of frustration" and just didn't want to eat them. The apples themselves were fine, but the memory of buying them was so negative that it spilled on the product. In the end, we ate those apples, but not before all the other options were exhausted. Do you want to be that choice? How people interact with you influences how they see your product. If their experience with your organization is good, they will see your product favorably, maybe even better than on the product's merit alone. Inversely, if your customer's experience with you is frustrating, they will feel that frustration every time they use your product, even if the product in itself is fine. How we treat customers is something we should strive to keep as positive as possible. The payback is high, and lasts a long time. Posted Oct 29 2008, 10:53 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: customer satisfaction

• Eveyrone thinks about dealines, but what about effort?

  When planning a project, we think about how long it will take to complete it. This is what we ask our team members: how long for you to code this module/wire this house/print these brochures? We forget how hard it will be, how much effort we will have to put into the task to complete it. It may take 3 days for paint to dry, but there is not much effort involved in this. It may take 3 days to code a module, for a team of 3 developers who will have to rewrite part of the software core to make it work. Same duration, different effort. If something has a high level of difficulty and requires a lot of effort, the risk of delay is much greater, and you should plan for it in your schedule, that is, how long you allow for the task to be completed. Posted Oct 27 2008, 10:53 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, schedules

• A fun trick: DON'T build your projects reports in AceProject

  All the boss wants is to know how the project is going. She's not interested in the task specifics. She wants to know if the project is on track or not. Of course, who manages just one project these days? You need to be able to show all your projects together. 2 little reports will do the trick for you: the Project Gantt Chart and a customized Projects list. Start with the Projects list.  Go to My Office > My Projects > My Assigned Projects. This page shows all the projects you're assigned to.  You can customize the look of this list to show computed fields like Actual Hours and Estimated Hours. I suggest you choose these fields: This will give you a nice report that you can simply print or export to Excel: A Projects report like this takes 5 seconds to make - you won't need to reset the columns once you've done it. It's dynamic, so the data is always up-to-date. It tells you instantly how on budget or off budget you are. And now for the Gantt For bosses who want it even simpler and more visual, go for the project Gantt chart. Go to Administration Light > Gantt Charts > Project Weekly View. Each project is shown as a bar, so it takes about one second to see which projects are on track and which are in trouble: And now you're done Put these two reports in an email, print them, insert them in a PowerPoint presentation. It took you about 5 minutes, and you can go back to managing the project.     Posted Oct 23 2008, 05:37 PM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, reports

• Irritants should be your first priority

  I tried to print a fax today. In Windows Vista's Picture Viewer. No can do. Vista sees my .tif file as an image, and tries to print is in landscape orientation. There was nothing I could do to change it. This highly aggravated. Vista was getting in the way of getting things done, a big no-no for tools - tools should help you get things done, not prevent you from that. I turned to Vista's help with no luck, and googled my problem. Lo an behold, I found several forum threads on that very subject. The solution: download a fax viewer that works. I am so irritated that I will download the software. If I could entirely replace Vista's picture viewer feature, I would. Don't be like Vista. Don't get in the way of your client's work.   Posted Oct 21 2008, 02:36 PM by Karine with no comments Filed under: product development

• What's your plan B?

  Do you have a plan in case something goes wrong in your project? Let's say a key team member accepts a position at another company. Are you prepared to reallocate her tasks to someone else? Is there someone else who could take over? Or, let's say the 5 more people that human resources were to hire for your team take longer than expected. Will your project still be on time without them? What are you going to do: overwork the people that are there, negotiate a new deadline? It's not about being pessimistic, but about being prepared. About knowing where the project could be endangered and thinking about how you're going to deal with that. Often, we don't want to think about those risks, because we are confident that we will succeed, and because we don't want to "jinx" it. But not planning ahead your risk management strategy is playing with fire. With risk management, you will be able to deal with potentially disastrous issues better, because you thought of what to do beforehand, not in the heat of the moment. Posted Oct 15 2008, 01:03 PM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management

• How to prevent your clients from breaking up with you

  Yesterday I wrote about my heart-breaking separation from my beloved Xobni. So how can we keep this from happening at our company? How do we keep our clients happy?   1. Close mouth, open ears It's the most basic part. Listen to your clients. REALLY listen to them, don't just hear them talk while imagining reasons why they're wrong. If you really pay attention to what your product's users are saying, you'll know exactly where the pain points are in the product and you'll have your priority list all drawn up for you. A few days after people create an account with AceProject, we send them an email and ask them what they think of the product, if they can suggest improvements or missing feature. The response we get is a very good source of inspiration for us.   2. Aggravation is really bad An exasperated client should never be ignored or dismissed. If you let aggravation at your product go unchecked, it only grows and never brings anything good to you, your product or your users. When someone is angry at your product, it should by your duty  to get some one-on-one time with them and try to understand what's making them so unhappy. In my experience, frustrated clients often start by stating something like "your product sucks!"  When I call them for details about the suckiness, I realize the true source of the frustration is something different: it might be that they feel they didn't get good service, or they don't understand a part of AceProject, or that there was a misunderstanding. 90% of the time, their aggravation is defused by having a real human call them, listen to them vent their emotions, and be willing to work with them to fix what makes them unhappy.   3. The personal touch works Customer service should be answered by a human, not a machine. It's just better. In our business, most of our clients do business with us without ever talking or emailing us here at customer service. They do it all online. When they need help, it always makes them really happy to hear a real human's voice on the line.   4. Test, test, test Of course, the basics of keeping customers happy is to deliver a functioning product. The key to this is not just to build a good product, but also to test like a gang of madmen. At AceProject, we test on 5 different browsers in two languages. We'd rather keep AceProject in beta longer than deliver something that's full bugs - there's nothing like a buggy system to make your users aggravated, and we've established that was bad.   5. Check your pride at the door That's the hardest one. You've worked on our new product for so long. In your eyes, it's perfect. You've spent a significant amount of time and effort in making flawless. How could someone find fault with it? Surely they must be wrong. Actually,  you've been working with our nose so close to the tree, you don't see the forest anymore. You don't see the big picture. The product may be perfect for you, but you're not the ones who will buy it. The thing is humans hate to be wrong. With a vengeance. So when a client pipes up and says "you product sucks!" our first reaction is disbelief.  I have so many times heard people in marketing and development say thing like "oh, this client doesn't know what she's doing, how can she criticize our product?" We must remember that we are building products that people will want to buy. If no one likes our product but us, there is no point trying to sell it. So we have to let go of our pride and be willing to admit we're not the only ones who can bring good suggestions to the table. Posted Oct 09 2008, 09:45 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: marketing, customer satisfaction

• Breaking up with a product you love

  This week, I had finally had enough. There was no apology that could fix the relationship, no reparations possible. It broke my heart but I had to do it. I broke up with a product I love. Xobni is a great Outlook Add-on that indexes all your email, provides neat metrics (like response times) and had a highly usable search interface. I had been using Xobni for months. Xobni had only one problem: it slowed down not only outlook, but my whole computer. At first I didn't want to admit it: I blamed it on the anti-virus software, then I did numerous registry cleaning sweeps, all to no avail. So even though I love Xobni and I love using it, I just can't take the slow-downs anymore. It's not me, it's Xobni When I uninstalled it, Xobni asked me if I wanted to know when performance issues were fixed.  So Xobni knew there problem was on its end, and it admitted to it. Now I am eagerly waiting for an email, hoping that I can reconcile with my beloved product. Where did it go wrong? I'm not on Xobni's development team. However, I've spent a bit of time on their forums, trying to know the cause (and hopefully the solution) of my problems. What I read was a lot of people writing to say how they loved Xobni and how sad they were that they had to uninstall it. Every once in a while, someone from Xobni's support team would pipe in, asking people to add their antivirus info to the support thread, and suggesting that people clean up their windows registry. As time passed, the ratio of people who were able to fix their performance issues VS people who had uninstall Xobni changed. There were more and more people removing Xobni. It seems Xobni's development team is having a hard time fixing the performance problem, and users are running out of patience.  It's that simple: the collective patience of users who believe in the product is running out. Back to normal, and I hate it Now I have a fast computer. But I have to make do with Outlook's search engine. I'm unhappy about that, but at least I'm not spending time waiting for my computer. Tomorrow: How to prevent your customers from breaking up with you   Posted Oct 09 2008, 09:00 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: sales, product development

• Why the AceProject development team is going agile

  As AceProject grows, it takes longer to put out a new version. There is more to test, the documentation takes longer to be finished, and debugging is a growing monster. Typical of waterfall development methods. Daniel, our president, was tired of this. He wanted us to be able to release versions faster, more efficiently. Instead of having a release-based development cycle, we'll have a feature-base development cycle. This means when a feature is out of the initial development phase, it will go straight to testing, documentation and debugging. It's going to be easier to test just the one feature and its implications. It's going to be faster to write documentation for just one feature at a time. It's going to be a lot easier for developers to debug the feature they just developed, because it's fresh in their minds. On another level, it's going to create one big team of the developers, testers and writer. Instead of the technical writer waiting for development to be done to start working, he will be working with them, as they develop the software. Documentation and testing teams often feel on the fringe of the development teams. Having everyone working together will benefit not only AceProject as a product, but also Websystems as a company. We'll be letting you know how that goes!     Posted Oct 07 2008, 07:11 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: product development, teamwork

• About elections and taking decisions based on facts

  This fall is exceptionnally lively, politically speaking. There are elections both in the USA and in Canada. While in the USA there are only two political parties, in Canada there are five major political parties: The conservatives The liberals The socialists The greens A regional party that represents the interests of the Quebec province That means 5 political programs. Five documents any elector should read before making a decision. That's a lot of information! This situation is an excellent example people making decisions based on their intuition instead of facts. Of course, there are some facts involved - the facts we read or hear about in the news or on political advertisements. But on voting day, it will all come down to guts: how we feel about the candidates, about the parties, and who we trust most. The truth is, we could make a complicated comparative chart of all five parties' programs and study it carefully, in the voting booth we would still choose with our gut. Posted Oct 03 2008, 10:05 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: decision

• Project management: share the burden with your team

  Project management can sometimes feel like such a burden. But is doesn't have to be this way. When only Project Managers support the burden: desktop tools In this situation, the project management tool is desktop-based and only accessible to the project manager. She needs to update the project, tasks and produce the reports on a regular basis.  In order to do the update, she relies on her team to give her the information in a timely manner. Then she must transcribe the information into the project management tool. Once the reports are produced, she has to email them around. Team members and upper management cannot have up-to-the-minute updates when they want to, they depend on the Project Manager to provide the information. What happens when she's on the road? Either she tries to squeeze in the updates somewhere between breakfast and her first meeting, or everybody waits.  This method begs the question, why can't the team update their stuff in the project? Why can't upper management click on a button and get the reports when it's convenient for them? The single-user project management tool is so old school. With fast networks and Internet access pretty much anywhere, there is no reason to keep working this way - unless the organization feels like bottlenecks are a good thing in the business process. When everyone on the team shares the burden: online tools In this situation, each team member updates his tasks, documents and worked hours in the project management tool. The project manager stays up-to-date on the project because she is alerted as soon as someone saves their changes in the project management tool. She can produce the reports herself and send them out. Better yet, anyone who wants to get the reports can see them online, when it's convenient for them. The nice thing about the new school method is that it doesn't add work on the team member -  they would still send updates to their project manager - while at the same time reducing the burden on the shoulders of the manager, and eliminating the bottleneck situation. And everyone breathes easier. Posted Oct 01 2008, 07:57 AM by Karine with no comments Filed under: project management, teamwork