9 Challenges in Project Management
By: Singular Factory
Tags: Metodologia, Project Management, English Posts

9 Challenges in Project Management

That can save or ruin your life

not every methodology fits for any type or size of project..

When you are managing a team, one of the most important aspects is the methodology your team will follow. Of course everybody could move forwards and work on their own, if you all dare, but it’s very likely that you will find yourself in a nightmare of delays and lack of knowledge, making the same mistakes, and putting out fires day over day.

However, spending too much time on the perfect plan can be also a waste, just because the reality is not perfect, and you cannot force it to adapt to your plan. It’s not the survival of the strongest no more, but the fastest.

We must consider that not every methodology fits for any type or size of project, and not everybody fits in following them.

However I’d like to share some challenges I usually run into, and some tips that might help you too solve your own ones.

1) Your project is important, but your team is even more important

You need to estimate and measure the progress of your projects, nobody wants to run out of budget or put a project in risk. But projects goes away and you need a team that lasts. Use every project to train your team and learn from them.

2) Measure and know yourself

You will need to do certain amount of work and it will take you certain amount of time. You will need to estimate your workload thoroughly, and consider that not everybody knows how fast they work, or how accurate they are at estimating. However, you cannot improve if don’t know your starting point, and you cannot continue working without money.

3) The secret of Team Velocity

If you don’t feel comfortable counting hours you can count work-points, stars, sheeps or puppies…

When you tell your teammates to track and fill the time dedicated to each task, some of them will feel intimidated. They might think that you are tracking if they are working or not, when the fact is that you already know that without any tracking. The real value of measuring is improving at estimating, and the first ones that will use that information are themselves. In our case, we count effective-hours and our velocity is about 6h/day per team member, meaning that we are able to choose tasks that sum 180h each sprint, and burn them (using sprints of two weeks and three teammates). If you have delays, having a velocity will help you predict if you need to change the release date and estimate how much. If you don’t feel comfortable counting hours you can count work-points, stars, sheeps or puppies, or anything that helps you measure the amount of work you are able to do during a time.

4) Estimate even if you fail

One of the first sentences someone new will say is “I don’t know how to estimate, I don’t know how long I will take… I don’t know…”. It’s ok if they don’t know, but the point is that they need to learn. Most likely they say that because they are afraid of failing, but failing will teach them what to correct. If you underestimated a 30% you’ll know that you should add that amount on your next estimation. If your individual tasks estimations are fine, but your projects always become bigger, you can compare the original estimation (the very first one with the original tasks) and the original estimation after (including the new tasks that appear during the development). Maybe you team is good at estimating tasks, but the scope definition needs to be improved.

5) It’s not you (who matters), it’s them

Certainly you could make an estimation for all your team but the reality is that it’s not you the one who will do this work. Of course, when you gain experiencie you will know that certain tasks should should be done in a certain time and everyone must improve. But you must be aware of the reality, right know that junior needs twice the time that you or your reference senior do need for the same work.

6) Burn the hell down!!

The time spent in justifying might be better used in how to fix it.

Whatever the amount of work you’ve done before, the most important thing is the amount of work that remains. When you work with a task, you are interested in how long it is taking, but most imporantly, how much work it still needs. That’s you goal, burn all that work down. On the other hand, you cannot change the past, all you can do is change what you’ll do next. Whatever mistakes might have happened, you must focus on what’s next. Some people will spend days justifying their mistakes. The point is that people can make mistakes, you already know that, you too will make mistakes. The time spent in justifying might be better used in how to fix it.

7) Play Poker

There’s a card game named Planning Poker, in which every team member choose a card with a value and hides it. Once everyone has made their choice they show their cards and two situations may happen:

— Everybody has a similar value, what means that you could be certain about the estimation, everybody agrees.

— Someone has a much higher or lower value, what means that either you might have seen a difficulty that your teammates didn’t, or that you or your teammates might have a better or fastest solution to the problem (maybe you did it before in other project and it’s already solved!).

8) Really short daily meetings

Short daily meetings can really help knowing the current state of a project and preventing working more than the necessary. But short meeting must be short:

- Use you phone’s chronometer, 1 minute per person, you don’t need more.

- Tell what you did yesterday and what you plan to finish today.

- Tell if you have any problem.

- Don’t solve them in these meetings! If there’s something that need discussing take note and arrange a meeting later on.

9) Be paranoid

Things that “should be ok”, aren’t ok unless you prove them. Things that once worked might not be working anymore. BE PARANOID.