Successful Projects

I promised a post (or two or three or four) on Action -what to do now that you’ve identified and verified that you have a project in trouble. So here we go….

You’ve identified you have a project in trouble. Now what?!?

Step number one:

Communications
Change control
Risk management
Personnel issues
Process

And immediately!

So I decided to do a post between knowing when your project is in trouble and action. I thought it might be nice to discuss the causes of troubled projects.

I’m sure if we all sat down and thought about it for 30 minutes we could come up with a list of a hundred or more causes of project failure. But I’m also fairly sure that if we thought about it a bit more we could fit all 100 of those into one or more of the listed items above. My experience has taught me that project trouble almost always comes from two main sources – personnel issues and poor choices by management or a combination of the two.

As I discuss project recovery in more detail I thought it would be nice to share how you know when a project is in trouble. This info comes right out of the materials I gave SoWY Department of Health. What was interesting is that they could identify with many of these symptoms of a project in trouble:

Everybody knows when a project is going south – most won’t admit to it, except by jumping ship or by pollinating poison through negative talk and gossip.

Once you know that the project is in trouble you need to act – next post

Yesterday I met with the IT Director for the Wyoming Department of Health. Ostensibly we were meeting to discuss me coming to Cheyenne as a contractor to help them turn around the Wyoming Client Information System – a project with which they have been having a great deal of trouble. It was pretty obvious from early on that my rate is a bit too high fro them and so I steered the discussion towards how they could best recover the project. I had planned fro this eventuality and had brought with me a traditional consulting leave behind that is a guide for project recovery. I had gained significant historical info and a lot of insight by speaking with members of the development team in the weeks prior to the meeting. This helped me tailor my presentation and leave-behind materials to WCIS and SoWY specifically.

Over the years I’ve developed a process I use to accomplish a recovery. I didn’t invent this process all by myself it has bits and pieces from others who’ve gone before me, but it has been tailored over the years to provide a framework that is most effective for me. This project recovery process is what I introduced the folks within SoWY IT to and what I left behind for them to use to hopefully recover the WCIS project. Here is a picture that provides an overview of the process:

My meeting with SoWY Department of Health is a perfect excuse to discuss, once again, the process for project recovery. So I’ll be breaking it up into bite size chunks over the next month and posting about the specifics. Stay tuned!! Hopefully this refresher will be beneficial.

Paul Boag posted a pretty funny post yesterday on the “10 things a web designer would never tell you”. It’s really great. You have to read it knowing that he’s being ironic and pretty sarcastic which is great. It’s funny how many times I’ve had clients – one recent one in particular – who said some of these same things to me.

My favorite experience was when I delivered a design mockup for a client’s home page and rather than commenting on the design this client, who has no design experience or skills, decided to create her own design in photoshop and send it to me. It was at this point that I realized this particular client needed someone with a significantly different skill set than mine and we parted ways.

95% of the time I have terrific experiences with my clients and they get that they’ve hired me for a reason – because I have skills and knowledge they don’t and because I’ll give them a terrific design that totally meets their needs and desires. Every once in a while though…….

One of the things I do for some clients is to introduce them to the wonderful world of Web 2.0 and all that it can offer them. For example I’ve got a client who owns her own organizing business. She’s been sending out quarterly email newsletters for quite some time now to her customer base. These newsletters are always informative and her customers typically get value from them. The problem is that they take forever for her to put together and because individual email clients don’t always handle html well if at all she’s doing straight text which is boring and does nothing to further reinforce her brand in the mind of her reader.

Another issue is that rigid spam filtering causes many of her newsletters to get lost.

So I’m helping her enter the world of blogging. The benefits are that by blogging she’ll be creating a dialogue with her customers – something more interactive as well as timely. By posting regularly instead of 4 times a year she’ll be building a relationship and a space where her customers can come on a regular basis to get advice or tips. Additionally, she’ll be creating a space where her customers can participate through comments – this can create an almost addictive quality where customers feel the need to come to the site frequently to read and participate.

Further, blogs have their own search engines and optimization schemes so combining a blog with a traditional marketing site means that she’s now increased the likelihood that her business will be discovered.

As I prepare my client to begin blogging it’s important to get her mind wrapped around the difference between writing for a blog vs. a newsletter. Jane Smith at PR In A Jar wrote a post called How To Blog that talks about the basics of blogging – how to get started and the right way to think about blogging. It’s very informative for new bloggers but it’s also a good review for those of us who’ve done it for a while.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

This is so cook I can barely contain myself. This is some fantastic human interaction – very CSI like or, as Dave Fleet said in his blog post – very Minority Report.

I got an email today from the Agile University in which were listed upcoming classes and the locations of those classes. I was surprised and encouraged to see that a couple of the classes were sold out. It got me to thinking about the current state of the economy and whether businesses send their folks to classes like these in order to increase the efficiency/output of their current staff. It also made me wonder if there are companies out there that are looking to make the switch to Agile as a result of needing to do more with less.

I’ve often thought that at times like these training in Project Management and especially niche areas like Agile have got to be attractive to companies that are forced to do more with less. I’ve also often made the argument that at times like these companies figure out what their minimum levels of staffing are.

What are your thoughts? What experiences are you having right now as a result of the faltering economy.

Mark Boulton wrote a post recently titled “Drupal.org, Design Iterations, and Designing in the open“. I’ve been thinking about this post for a while because at my work – Envysion – we are constantly trying to determine the best way to incorporate feedback from our users in our web application.

We certainly don’t have the number of users that Drupal does – hundreds of thousands – but we have a fair number and trying to get feedback and then incorporate that feedback is always a challenge. Drupal has solved it in a very forward thinking, web 2.0 manner by opening a twitter channel, utilizing Flickr and by using the notion of groups which in Drupal’s case is a simplified forum.

I like the way Drupal has involved the users and the methods they’ve chosen to do so and to organize the information they’ve gotten back. I’m anxious to see how Drupal changes their application in response to the feedback in order to determine the level of success.

On Sunday Patrick May posted an article on The Mercury News titled, We’re connecting – and wasting time – on Twitter. It’s a very insightful article on Twitter in general, its growth in popularity and how some users are utilizing it to get/share information and to conduct business.

The opening line of the article is, “Some have called Twitter “the ‘Seinfeld’ of the Internet – a Web site about nothing.” This is so true. Yet another hugely popular bit of geek technomasturbation with no real business model, no definable usage model but with a following of millions (1.2 million unique visitors in May according to Patrick) of loyal/addicted fans/followers/fanatics. I would love it if my application had this kind of following.

Apparently Twitter are trying out ads on the Japanese version of their site in an attempt to find a revenue model. The problem with any revenue model at Twitter is stated quite eloquently by Jere,iah Owyang of Forrester Research – “to expect everyone to use
this tool is very unlikely; it will be for only a small percentage of
Internet users. And it will absolutely have competition, once the cell
phone industry figures out another way to enhance their text-messaging
systems and charge for it.”

There it is in a nut shell. Few will use it and the ones who do aren’t typically the types to pay a lot of money for a service that really isn’t that much more valuable than SMS. All of that not withstanding Twitter is a phenomenon albeit a time sucking somewhat useless one.

The lesson is: 1) Whatever you’re building try like hell to make it crack-like in its appeal to your target user audience and, 2) make sure the appeal is as broad as possible and that you’ve thought of a business/revenue model that can/will capitalize on the ferocity of your users passion about your thing.