Social media tools appeal to that part of all of us that want and need to connect to other humans like us, – to find groups, clubs, lodges, and communities that we have something in common with and contribute in a meaningful way – even if it’s to just share a story or an insight that is uniquely us.  We all crave a sense of belonging, contribution, enrichment, and fellowship.  That’s why we join churches, gyms, civic and professional organizations, sororities, fraternities, etc.  When we are comfortably established within a circle, we naturally want to reach out and keep up and find out what’s new within our circle and share the thoughts, ideas and events that are important to us.  Social media platforms allow us the ability to do this easily and virtually.  Since we have the same needs on projects – to establish an environment that fosters effective communication and information flow between stakeholders, it would seem that social media tools would be a natural answer.  Why then, is there not more success?

A Brand Science Institute study performed in Europe in August 2010 suggested that most social media projects will fail.  As commented further by Jacob Morgan of Chess Media Group, a management consultancy and strategic advisory firm on social business, this is because clearly defined values are usually not established at the onset of a social strategy for both the customer and the company.  Creating a Facebook page or a Twitter account because it’s “cool” , but not really knowing what you plan to do with it is a recipe for failure.  The project will end up with a presence that has unorganized, uncontrolled, or nonexistent content.   Here are some specific tips for using social media tools on projects:

• First, establish a strategy and purpose for the social media tools chosen.  This could be something such as to promote collaboration and foster active participation in communications – both the sending and receiving of information.
• Establish policies and procedures.  Determine any security barriers:  will external internet platforms be acceptable for use and if so how?    If not, create tools or “characteristics” internally using sharepoint or the intranet.  Define ground rules for usage – what restrictions will be enforced.  How will the tools be moderated, and who will do the moderation?  Document the calendar of publications, or any expectations of how the tools should be used.  Create any templates or forms that will be employed.
• Suggestions for project specific uses of social media tools:
  • Wiki’s – Wiki’s encourage collaboration by team members on project documentation and can be used for any type of project documentation: code, requirements, test cases, design specifications, project management artifacts, or end user help documentation.
  • Blogs – Blogs can be used to allow team members to write articles on progress, challenges, or best practices in their discipline.  Blogs from the project manager could contain the status reports.  Specialty blogs could contain messages from the sponsor.
  • Audio/Video messages – Podcasts (audio messages) and videos can be used for training communications or inspirational messages from the sponsor.  The elements of sound and video add richness to a message and give it more depth and dimension than written text alone.
  • Youtube – Youtube can be used as a repository to research expert presentations on best practices.
  • LinkedIn – Linkedin is a professional virtual networking site, which similar to the use of Youtube can facilitate research.  It supports targeting professionals or organizations by certain search criteria, participating in group discussion threads, posting questions, and recruiting.
  • Twitter – Twitter can be used to post brief updates on project activities available to followers of the account.  Consider the benefits of this as contrasted with more traditional approaches such as emailing a large distribution list or embedding within a long status report.  The account’s historical tweet stream has search capability, hash tags to categorize topics with keywords, and the ability to embed shortened URL’s to point to other web content.  Yammer is a corporate (non public) tool that allows similar functionality if security restrictions do not permit the use of Twitter over the public internet.
  • Facebook – A Facebook page can be set up for the project to post stories about social gatherings of team activities in different locations.  This helps promote bonding between the team members who are not co-located. 

The point is, in order to tap into that natural instinct we all have to reach out to each other and share – which seems to be all too elusive on projects sometimes – we need to incorporate the “F” word.  We need to introduce a little FUN.  The extent to which social media tools are pounded on by our team members outside of work is testament to their appeal, so why not have them work in favor of the project instead of against it?

I just established a war room for the beginning of a new project.  In its simplest terms, a war room is a workspace dedicated to a collocated project team, enabling team members to work together to quickly create a solution to a business problem or address a business opportunity. 

 Over the years, I have been responsible for many war rooms and I have been collocated in war rooms run by other project managers.  I love a good war room.  When done well, I think a war room contributes to better work, shorter cycles and a really positive team experience.  When done poorly, a war room is just another meeting space. 

 This got me thinking about my own personal “war room best practices”, which I will share here.  I would love to hear your best practices on this topic, if you have any you’d like to share. 

 Ground Rules

I hate to start off a fun topic with something as pedestrian as rules, but when you have a group work space, it’s best to begin with a clear understanding of boundaries. 

 In my experience, the biggest issues are usually around non-project discussions in the project work room.  I always have a rule that anyone can stop by the War Room to have a quick discussion with a project resource, but those discussions cannot last longer than 5 minutes.  This is clearly stated in the room on a WAR ROOM RULES poster, and I have a kitchen timer nearby just for that purpose.  It not only protects the other folks in the room from having their space co-opted by a non-project meeting, it actually helps the project resource from continually being pulled back into non-project work that has been reassigned (successfully or not) to someone else. 

 The other way this issue rears its ugly head is in cell-phone conversations.  We have all worked on a team with someone whose spouse or children call every 20 minutes.  I have a rule that there will be no non-project related telephone conversations in the War Room either.  If you need to take a personal call, step out of the room.  If you have a teleconference that is not related to the project, attend from another location.

 Another idea is to post “core work hours” for the project room, during which all resources will be in the room and available.  Not only does this clear the way for collaborative work, it lets resources set the expectations of their managers, peers and customers appropriately. 

 Creature Comforts

I think a War Room ought to be a pleasing place that people are excited to be assigned to.  Food is one of the easiest ways to turn a work session into an “event”.  I always provision my War Rooms with snacks (both healthy and unhealthy) to send the message that “you, and the work we are doing here together, is special, not run of the mill or routine”. 

 I bring in lunch and/or breakfast on deadline days to send the message that the time and attention of the people on the project team is so important to the success of the project that I don’t want them worrying about finding something to eat.

 Don’t forget about other things that contribute to a comfortable work space.  Keep the area clean.  Open a window or bring in air fresheners.  Do what you can to create a temperature that is comfortable to most of the people most of the time, and bring in fans or heaters for people who need them. 

Depending on the people in the room and the work underway, I have played music in the room.  In one of my War Rooms, we worked European business hours for three weeks one December, requiring us to start our work day at 2:00 am every day.  We played Christmas music and had bagels every morning to get the day started. 

 On another project we had a huge, all-hands-on deck “cut and paste” effort to get some data normalized into a giant excel spreadsheet. Because our customer had dropped the ball on it, my team undertook this really low-value but critical task.  The team worried that we wouldn’t be able to stay awake during the 8-12 hours it would take to complete the work.  So, I streamed a Law and Order: SVU marathon through the projector and we ordered pizza for lunch, and everyone talked about how it reminded them of cram sessions they endured in college.  This tedious task turned out to be a team-building effort because we all pitched in and made the best out of a bad situation. 

 Visuals

People are stimulated by graphics and visual representations so you should have some project artifacts on the walls of your War Room.  Not only can these be appealing and information for the people on the team, they can be a great way to share information about the project to the rest of your organization. 

Use the space you have to guide project discussions and underline project information.  A blank wall becomes a living flow chart with painter’s tape for swim lanes and sticky notes for process information.  You can easily make and print calendars and tape them around the room, although I prefer large dry erase calendars that can be used for planning and what-if scenarios. 

Testimonials, customer artifacts (anything with a logo) and company information can be used to keep people focused on the long term goals of the project. 

Then take all that useful visual information and hold a project “Open House”.  Send out invitations and invite people to come in, visit with the team, and see what’s going on in the work room.  Make it a fun event with food (ice cream social, anyone?) and door prizes.  Tying this in with major project milestones can also serve your change management and communications plans as well.   

 Customs

Finally, it’s hard to create traditions, but you can certainly recognize trends that can turn into War Room Customs. 

 For example, I worked with one gentleman who would say “Big brain on so and so” whenever someone had a great idea.  Eventually we would all say it to each other to recognize a good idea – “Big brain on Bob today!”, so I went to a teacher’s supply store and bought a… big brain.   Then when we wanted to recognize someone, we would say “Big brain on Beth” and toss Beth the big brain.

 At another organization, we used the word “sacred cow” quite frequently, so I bought a small, stuffed cow that we would hand around the table when we wanted to challenge someone to think differently about and idea they demonstrated a stubborn loyalty toward.

 These are some of my best practices, and I am eager to hear yours.

• The first iteration will almost always be a bust. The team is learning how to estimate their work an entirely new way with relative story points, and assessing how much work can be fit into a preset allotment of time. It is very typical for the team to overshoot and not get all the work done that they carve out for themselves. It usually takes 1 or 2 iterations for the team to gauge their velocity or number of story points they can accomplish in an iteration. Only then should an attempt be made to do any type of release planning so you will know how many iterations it will take to achieve all the functionality desired in the release.
• One of the benefits of agile is the flexibility is offers around scope change between iterations, but the cardinal rule is that once the scope of the iteration or sprint is set, no one disrupts the team. That means no high level stakeholders pulling rank and diverting team members to go work on another project. This is one of the reasons the iterations are kept short – no more than 30 days usually, and sometimes shorter, so that the team comes up for air frequently to entertain changes. An obvious issue with this design is the case where the same team must support bug fixes as well as new feature development. One solution to this is to build into every iteration some buffer stories for unknown bug fixes that can be assigned if critical bugs are logged during the iteration that must be addressed by one of the team members.
• On an agile team there is no traditional command and control model. There is no traditional project manager role. The scrum master has no direct authority; he/she is more a facilitator. The team is self directed and self organizing. The team members assign themselves work from the waiting tasks list. This is a hard one for many managers to swallow. They believe that without a supervisor to crack the whip, the team members will have no motivation to work. Most scrum masters find the opposite is actually true. If anything, they have to coach the team to be less aggressive and not bite off more than they can chew. When held accountable for their own work team members will most often rise to the occasion and try harder to prove their worth and value. Where scrum masters do add value is to coach team members to direct their effort towards completeness of fewer stories rather than near completeness of more stories. The only stories that can be demoed at the end of an iteration are completed stories.
• Agile means fewer artifacts. There is a product backlog containing user stories, iteration backlog, and some burn down charts. Typically that’s it. If there is anything more, it is due to organizational culture requirements. As the engineering progresses and conversation happens between developer and business, validation requirements (which is where typical detailed business specifications would be captured) will be developed and captured as part of the test driven development process – which is where it should be to have any real utility. How often have you really ever looked at those extensive business requirement documents (BRDs) after they’ve been developed? Certainly by the time a new project is launched, they are usually outdated and if they are even archived anywhere, they are usually never looked at again. All that effort wasted. So spending the effort getting the right people talking in the first place and documenting where it needs to be won’t result in a lack of valuable documentation, because all those BRDs were never truly valued much in the first place.

Spend time making sure your management really understands how the new agile team will work with each other and with others in the organization and what is expected of them before you start. They will appreciate the education and it just might keep you from becoming the next Dilbert cartoon.

Over the years, I have been responsible for many war rooms and I have been collocated in war rooms run by other project managers.  I love a good war room.  When done well, I think a war room contributes to better work, shorter cycles and a really positive team experience.  When done poorly, a war room is just another meeting space. 

This got me thinking about my own personal “war room best practices”, which I will share here.  I would love to hear your best practices on this topic, if you have any you’d like to share. 

Ground rules

I hate to start off a fun topic with something as pedestrian as rules, but when you have a group work space, it’s best to begin with a clear understanding of boundaries. 

In my experience, the biggest issues are usually around non-project discussions in the project work room.  I always have a rule that anyone can stop by the War Room to have a quick discussion with a project resource, but those discussions cannot last longer than 10 minutes.  This is clearly stated in the room on a WAR ROOM RULES poster, and I have a kitchen timer nearby just for that purpose.  It not only protects the other folks in the room from having their space co-opted by a non-project meeting, it actually helps the project resource from continually being drug back into non-project work that they has been reassigned (successfully or not) to someone else. 

The other way this issue rears its ugly head is in cell-phone conversations.  We have all worked on a team with someone who’s spouse or children call every 20 minutes.  I have a rule that there will be no non-project related telephone conversations in the War Room either.  If you need to take a personal call, step out of the room.  If you have a teleconference that is not related to the project, attend from another location.

Another idea is to post “core work hours” for the project room, during which all resources will be in the room and available.  Not only does this clear the way for collaborative work, it lets resources set the expectations of their managers, peers and customers appropriately. 

Creature Comforts

I think a War Room ought to be a pleasing place that people are excited to be assigned to.  Food is one of the easiest ways to turn a work session into an “event”.  I always provision my War Rooms with snacks (both healthy and unhealthy) to send the message that “you, and the work we are doing here together, is special, not run of the mill or routine”. 

I bring in lunch and/or breakfast on deadline days to send the message that the time and attention of the people on the project team is so important to the success of the project that I don’t want them worrying about finding something to eat.

Don’t forget about other things that contribute to a comfortable work space.  Keep the area clean.  Open a window or bring in air fresheners.  Do what you can to create a temperature that is comfortable to most of the people most of the time, and bring in fans or heaters for people who need them. 

Depending on the people in the room and the work underway, I have played music in the room.  In one of my War Rooms, we worked European business hours for three weeks one December, requiring us to start our work day at 2:00 am every day.  We played Christmas music and had bagels every morning to get the day started. 

On another project we had a huge, all-hands-on deck “cut and paste” effort to get some data normalized into a giant excel spreadsheet. Because our customer had dropped the ball on it, my team undertook this really low-value but critical task.  The team worried that we wouldn’t be able to stay awake during the 8-12 hours it would take to complete the work.  So, I streamed a Law and Order: SVU marathon through the projector and we ordered pizza for lunch, and everyone talked about how it reminded them of cram sessions they endured in college.  This tedious task turned out to be a team-building effort because we all pitched in and made the best out of a bad situation. 

Visuals

People are stimulated by graphics and visual representations so you should have some project artifacts on the walls of your War Room.  Not only can these be appealing and information for the people on the team, they can be a great way to share information about the project to the rest of your organization. 

Use the space you have to guide project discussions and underline project information.  A blank wall becomes a living flow chart with painter’s tape for swim lanes and sticky notes for process information.  You can easily make and print calendars and tape them around the room, although I prefer large dry erase calendars that can be used for planning and what-if scenarios. 

Testimonials, customer artifacts (anything with a logo) and company information can be used to keep people focused on the long term goals of the project. 

Customs

Finally, it’s hard to create traditions, but you can certainly recognize trends that can turn into War Room Customs. 

For example, I worked with one gentleman who would say “Big brain on so and so” whenever someone had a great idea.  Eventually we would all say it to each other to recognize a good idea – “Big brain on Bob today!”, so I went to a teacher’s supply store and bought a… big brain.   Then when we wanted to recognize someone, we would say “Big brain on Beth” and toss Beth the big brain.

At another organization, we used the word “sacred cow” quite frequently, so I bought a small, stuffed cow that we would hand around the table when we wanted to challenge someone to think differently about and idea they demonstrated a stubborn loyalty toward.

These are some of my best practices, and I am eager to hear yours.

Processes:   The primary scrum processes allow for grooming of the product backlog or clarifying the complexity by specifying effort factor (story points), grouping work from the product backlog into work iterations, defining and estimating technical work tasks for the work iterations, and packaging completed outputs of the work iterations into a working release product.  Below is a breakdown of the different scrum processes along with their descriptions and analogous waterfall counterpart.

Meetings:    Since frequent feedback is the hallmark of agile, the scrum meeting are the settings that facilitate some of the above processes, as well as allow for frequent status during the work intervals or sprints, and provide the vehicle for the customer acceptance and process improvement.  Below is a table that describes the major scrum meetings, descriptions and their waterfall counterparts.

 Artifacts:  Artifacts are sparse compared to a typical waterfall methodology. All work “to do” is tracked on the product backlog.  Work “left to go”  is tracked on one of 2 types of burn down charts and are meant to show progress to the organization.  Business requirements will seem sketchy in agile as compared to waterfall since preference is given to conversations amongst members of the team, and verification through acceptance criteria and demonstrations.  Below is a description of scrum artifacts.

 In scrum, relative estimation keeps the estimation process intuitive and non specific.  It’s done in group session with the entire team where everyone “votes” on their number all at once to keep voting independent.  The relative story points assist the product manager in backlog prioritization.  Sprint planning makes up the rest of the planning for a 30 day period.  This is where the detailed task decomposition and hourly estimation occurs.

Once a sprint is planned, work is executed and monitored in the daily standup meetings.  Issues are tracked in the Sprint impediment log.  Progress is displayed to the organization in artifacts such as the sprint and product burn down charts.

At the end of the sprint, the work is verified and accepted or rejected in the sprint demonstration meeting.  Then the sprint processes are reviewed and suggestions for improvement are made in the sprint retrospective, before reprioritizing the product backlog if necessary and beginning a new sprint.

I first became interested in agile when I was leading technology teams and consistently struggled with the standard waterfall challenge of getting accurate, complete, well understand and well documented business requirements for long software development application projects.  Once we felt like we finally got things “nailed down” and began design and development work, requirements would change before we could deliver the first release.  The agile methodology is a natural solution for this.  I began my own course of self study, networking and training, and eventually acquired a scrum master certification.

To understand the principles of any of the flavors of agile methodology (and there are several), you need to first understand the agile manifesto, developed by the original set of agile founders:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Scrum happens to be one of the most popular types of agile and derives its name from a daily standup meeting called the scrum meeting, involving the team and the facilitator who is called the scrum master.  Below is a discussion which breaks down some of the important roles used in scrum and compares them to their analogous counterpart in a waterfall methodology. 

Roles – there are only 3 officially recognized roles on an agile scrum team:

• Product Owner – The product owner is a member of the scrum team and is responsible for what the team builds and for optimizing the value of it.  He/she owns decisions and risks regarding what business stakeholders want.  He/she defines the features to be produced and decides on release date and content, and determines feature priorities.  He/she can change features and priority between sprints.  He/she negotiates acceptance criteria for work results with rest of team
• Scrum Master – facilitates process and keeps things moving.  He/she manages the internal dynamics of the team including the relationship of the product owner with the rest of the team.  He/she enforces the scrum framework.  He/she ensures full team involvement in all meetings and keeps everything visible, including “radiating” information to the larger organization.  He/she shields the team from external interference.  He/she advocates improved practices.  Very important:  He/she facilitates, but does not manage.  The scrum master has no official authority over the team.  He/she cannot assign work to the team.
• Team – This is a small (7 +-2 member) cross functional group who are responsible for the work they agree to take on during the work period called a sprint.  They are a self organizing unit – meaning they assign sprint work tasks to themselves.  They negotiate the work of the sprint with the product owner.  Along with the product owner, they demo the work results to the stakeholders.

The product owner is analogous to a business analyst, product manager or sponsor in a waterfall methodology, and the team is similar to any team anywhere, with the exception of the self organizing part.  That’s a little loose-y goose-y for a lot of management teams to get used to.  Frankly, what I’ve seen in a lot of companies I’ve networked with is a gradual approach to this, because as much as this sounds like a great goal, in companies that have been highly command and control, teams have to get as used to it as the managers themselves do.  The scrum master could be similar to a technical team lead or a technical project manager in some organizations.  What is strikingly missing in this model is the overall project manager him/herself.  The traditional, all controlling, project manager doesn’t really have a direct correlation.  To find a home in an agile practicing organization the PMI style project manager has to make some decisions.  For individuals with a more product oriented, business slant, the product owner might be a great role to assume.  For the more technically minded, the scrum master role might be a better fit.

One of the most intriguing differences between agile and waterfall and what in my mind makes agile so compelling is in the area of scope control.  In the waterfall methodology we go to great lengths to define the scope of the project in as much detail as we can all up front, and then protect that scope.  We define a rigid scope change process which acts as a deterrent to anyone who wants to introduce changes to the work that we already have a complex tangle of design plans around, because of the cost and pain of implementation when you work on everything all at once.  With agile the notion of scope control is virtually non-existent, except within the context of the short periods of work, called sprints.  This is by design.  This is to allow and even encourage the product owner to be flexible and change their mind in between sprints as the business sees the results of work and reacts to it; and as events in the business change. 

In a nutshell, product features and all other work are maintained in a document called the product backlog, in single threaded priority by the product owner.  The team determines “chunks” of that work off the top that they can perform in time boxed periods of work called sprints (usually 30 days).  Once a sprint starts, the scrum master insures that the scope of the sprint does not change.  At the end of the sprint the team and the product owner jointly demo the work that has been completed to the business stakeholders.  The product backlog is reprioritized if necessary by the product owner and another sprint is started.  Sprints are repeated until enough work is completed to comprise a release.  Sounds simple huh?  Well there’s a little more to it than that.

In my next article I will discuss the small set of artifacts, meetings and processes involved and discuss what they compare to in a waterfall context.

And while conventional wisdom says that social media is used primarily by the young, that’s not really true.  According to Forrester Research, the percentage of Boomers consuming social media was 67% for younger Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 62% for older Boomers (ages 53 to 63) in 2008.

In its Boomers and Social Media report, eMarketer notes that Boomers love Facebook far more than other social media sites, with 73% of the group claiming to maintain a Facebook profile. 

So, how can a project manager use social media?  Below are some ideas, but first a word of caution: when incorporating social media into your PR campaign, pay special attention to security and privacy issues.  The appeal of social media is its wide accessibility and its easy access, two strengths that can backfire on you, or someone on your team, if you share something your organization isn’t comfortable with.

Medium: Blogs / Wikis

Idea: start a project blog

A blog or wiki site is a great way to share project information and gather feedback, which helpts to create a collaborative environment.

YouTube

Idea: post a PowerPoint with music or audio or a simple video

This is a fun way to control your message and build your team.  Video messages from project leadership or sponsors can mean a lot to a dispersed team.  Video messages from different work sites can speed the process of building a virtual team. 

Twitter

Idea: create a group on Twitter using a unique hashtag

Twitter is best used for team building.  Create a hash tag for your project, a unique name preceded by the # sign, and make sure all of your Tweets include it.  Then your users can search for all the Tweets about the project.  This can be particularly engaging for a dispersed team, is popular with cell phone users, and can be used for quick updates in “teamspeak”.  Twitter feels much like instant messaging, but conversations on Twitter are searchable, so they are not private.   

Facebook / MySpace

Idea: create a project page in Facebook

A project page on Facebook or MySpace allows shareholders to comment and provide feedback.  This can be an engaging way to build a diverse team.  You can share project information or just fun stuff like pictures and videos of social gatherings or meetings.   These sites do have some privacy settings that will help you control who views this content. 

Linked In / PM Net

Idea: Research a project challenge on a business networking site

This is a great way to connect with experts in your field, gather a lot of ideas in a short time, and find or start a discussion about a topic that interests you.    

SharePoint/Google Sites:

Idea: Leverage the best ideas from social media for your internal tools

If you can’t take advantage of external social media tools, take the collaborative features that make social media so popular and apply them to your internal tools.  Start a blog, use videos and pictures, have a contest, just get people interested in collaborating.

• Interviews – a one on one or one on several (2-3) of stakeholders question and answer session guided by a pre scripted list of tailored questions.  The questions should be comprised of a set of context free inquiries to promote bias free discussion.  Once the context free answers have been documented, some solution specific questions can be used to explore stakeholder leanings related to specific solutions.
• Brainstorming workshops – a facilitated multi hour, perhaps all day session with all key stakeholders present.  There are usually ice breaking and warm up exercises to set ground rules and promote free thinking.  Then there is grounding in basic project material, followed by group brainstorming to elicit multiple ideas.  Usual rules are to generate as many ideas as possible, piggy back ideas off each other, and suspend judgment on any idea. Towards the end of the workshop the ideas must be grouped, clarified, reduced and prioritized.  These sessions are notorious for sometimes being difficult to manage and requiring the skills of a trained facilitator – preferable one from outside the organization with no political ties to any of the stakeholders.  Typical challenges include:
  • Time Management
  • Domineering
  • Lackluster participation
  • Negative, petty comments
  • Turf wars
  • Post lunch energy sag
• Role Playing – basically this is like walking a mile in the stakeholder’s shoes.  When possible the analyst carries out a day in the job of the stakeholder he/she is trying to gather requirements from – i.e. using the computer application to enter an order, welding a part, etc.
• Scripted walkthroughs – similar to role playing, when an actual role play is not possible, this method allows a simulated experience via a script.
• Prototypes – typically used in the context of a software development effort, a prototype is a partial implementation – a mock up of the external interface or what the stakeholder experiences when he interacts with the system.  This is a good way to let the stakeholder play with the model and discover what feels to be missing.  This sometimes uncovers entire feature sets that until then were unexpressed.
• Storyboarding – Similar, but less elegant than prototypes, story boarding is used to gain early reactions from stakeholders on concepts proposed for deliverables.  Story boards can exist in 3 different styles:
  • Passive, containing screen shots, written business rules, process flow diagrams, output reports, etc. all laid out in a sequence so as to paint a picture or tell a “story” about how things will work.
  • Active, containing slideshows, animation, or simulations to try to make stakeholders see a movie that hasn’t been created yet.
  • Interactive, requiring participation in order to allow the stakeholder to experience the system in as realistic a manner as possible.

From my experience, I like to employ a combination of the above methods.  Personally, I never like to convene a large group to discuss anything with a blank sheet of paper.  I believe beginning a large group session with no content already established at least at a high level – i.e. a blank canvass is an invitation for chaos.  My preference is to outline the areas of requirements and determine who the primary stakeholders are for each area first, from analysis of project objectives and discussion with sponsors.  Then create a targeted questionnaire around each focused area and interview 1 – 3 primary stakeholders who are most directly affected / involved with the topic to get the core facts.  Sometimes a role play or scripted walk through can be combined with an interview to allow the stakeholder to demonstrate their world to the business analyst.  The larger “big tent” sessions can then be a refinement or validation session of those core facts by secondary stakeholders who can add their concerns and needs.  These secondary stakeholders may be primary stakeholders of another area. 

Once an initial set of requirements have been gathered story boards and prototypes allow analysts and implementation teams to demonstrate back to the stakeholders whether they “got it” right and seek verification before they commit to final implementation.

Requirements elicitation is hard work requiring a mind meld of those participating in the process on whatever level of detail is being discussed. The more you limit the number to those who have expertise on a focused topic, the more likely you are to reach consensus.

What are your thoughts?

References:

Leffingwell,D., Widrig, D. (2000) Managing Software Requirements, A Unified Approach, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley.

In many respects, the successful planning and management of a turn around project are similar to a normal project.  It requires a new charter, and project plan to evaluate the failings of the first project and define the actions required to correct course.  There are many dimensions to a troubled project, and many things that must be done.  This will not be an article to attempt to discuss all the aspects of how to address a failed or troubled project, but how to address the communications and more specifically – the public relations during the turn around effort.  Through the course of this blog I have written many articles about public relations on projects.  The communications and public relations campaign of a turn around project certainly require the same PR principles that any project does such as:

• Communications message content focused on benefits, helping to keep stakeholders’ focus on the ultimate goal to be achieved at the end of the journey.
• Messages relating not just the information of activities or events, but conveying the value of those events to the business.
• Communicating information promptly, when it is of prime interest and relevance to stakeholders.
• Being aware of the spin or nuance in a message and selecting the appropriate tone of a message that is right for the target audience.

What is different about a troubled project, however, is that unlike a normal project, the project manager does not start with a clean slate and friendly stakeholders.  On a normal project everyone gives you the benefit of the doubt at the beginning.  The project manager can leverage the natural excitement that exists around a new undertaking and create friends of the project.  Once things begin to go awry, all that is lost and stakeholders are now mad.  The recovery PM operates from a position of a PR deficit.  As the public “face” of the project, he/she may no longer have any credibility and this requires extra finesse in the public relations campaign. 

There is no fast or easy way out of the PR deficit position, other than real performance – i.e. actually beginning to make some of the new commitments.  Until that is possible, a certain amount of humility when wearing the “project face” is just part of the role.  What stakeholders tend to want at this point is honest, clear, reliable, complete, straightforward, and prompt information.  As you and your team are performing discovery and identifying priorities, it is important to publicly acknowledge them – even before you may know the solutions.  This helps ease stakeholders’ anxieties that they have been heard and understood.  Your ability to quickly establish the stakeholders’ belief that the information being communicated is reliable and objective establishes credibility. It needs to be complete to insure that quality decisions are derived as a result.   Stakeholders want an open admission of mistakes that were made.  Fortunately, project management gives us a good framework that allows us to discuss such things as lessons learned in a respectful way that retains dignity for the team – especially when combined with process improvements that were implemented as a result of those lessons.  This is important to preserve the morale of the team because the team must carry out the required recovery work. 

A recovery project will probably institute more frequent feedback loops and communications should follow suit.  You cannot afford to let the silence created by a void of information generate panic driven false rumors.  PR during a troubled project therefore becomes very time consuming and it is a good idea to consider appointing a lead who is devoted to managing PR and frequent, prompt communications while the implementation team focuses on resolving issues and carrying out the work.

But what if the stakeholders themselves are the problem?  As described in the ESI International white paper entitled “Saving Troubled Projects”, one of the first things that must be discovered is project history and sensitivities.  As with any project, having a strong supporting sponsor with the appropriate level of seniority and credibility is essential for success.  This sends a clear message to stakeholders that this work is of importance.  The recovery project manager must make an effort to understand the political environment the project has operated in.  He/she must fully understand the objectives of the project, as well as the objectives and motivations of the stakeholders and where those may have been in conflict.  The sponsor should be leveraged to handle stakeholders whose motivations may be at cross purposes with the goals and objectives stated in the charter. 

In summary, a recovery project manager must use all the public relations tools employed on normal projects to an even greater degree on a troubled project to keep stakeholders eyes on the prize as the team rights the ship back on course.

Pulling the plug on a project is an interesting change management issue. While we as project managers sign up for a project knowing that it is, by definition, temporary, we want it to end because we have finished the work, not because the organization no longer wants it.  And we get very emotionally invested in our projects, maybe because they are temporary, and we feel like we can really make an impact during our brief stewardship.  As a result, we can suffer some real feelings of loss when a project is cancelled, just like any other member of the project team.    

So I was very interested when I came across an article in CIO magazine recently, entitled When IT Projects Founder, Emotions Run High, by Michael Fitzgerald.  “It’s hard not to get emotional when lengthy, high-profile technology projects are unfairly killed, mercifully euthanized or launched with flaws.”, Fitzgerald writes. 

Fitzgerald shines a light on a slightly embarrassing topic for many IT folks.  It’s, uh, about, ahem, feelings.  It is that reticence to talk about feelings that can cause so many problems when a project ends unexpectedly. 

 “Every killed or troubled project has its own particular tale of woe”, says Fitzgerald.  “Some suffer because of unforeseen events — the end of the Cold War, an economic downturn, a merger, a shift in business priorities.  Some founder because of a bad combination of technology, ambition and skills. But whenever projects stumble or even die, and people feel wounded, it usually has something to do with that most persistent of people problems: communication.”

If you are going to spend your summer with a dying project, don’t forget to attend to the feelings that people have about their work.  Once asked to make a commitment to a project, it can be hard for many people to just to flip a switch in their mind and divorce themselves from it.  People need to talk about how they feel at the end of a project, and a good project manager will help them.

One easy exercise that can help bring closure to the project team is the Glads, Sads, and Mads Exercise.  Think of this as a Lessons Learned session for emotions!  Assemble your team, perhaps in a casual or offsite setting, and go around the room, asking each person to share three feelings about the project:  why they are glad the project is ending, why they are sad it is ending, and why they are mad it is ending.  This helps the team by getting their feelings out in the open and hearing fresh perspectives.  They may be relieved to learn that others have strong emotions, too, and may be pleased to see the level of commitment expressed by their teammates.

Whatever you do, don’t ignore the emotional side of a cancelled technology project.  Make sure your team members don’t care negative feelings or emotions on to their next project by helping them deal with their feelings when they close out the old project.