Project Execution

The Basics

Tracking

• Commonly tracked items
  • Project schedule
  • Status of action items, key tasks activities
  • Progress toward milestones
  • Costs
  • Key decisions, changes, dependencies and risks to the project
• Tracking methods
  • GANTT chart
  • Roadmap
  • Burndown chart
• Project report
  • Project name
  • Date
  • Summary
  • Status - RAG (Red, Amber, Green) / Spotlight status
  • Milestones and tasks
  • Issues

Managing Changes and Risks

See change-management.

Quality Management

• Components
  • Standards
  • Planning
  • Assurance - prevent defects, during the dev process
  • Control - identify defects and handle accordingly
• Resources
  • What are quality standards? | ASQ
  • What is a quality plan? | ASQ
  • Quality assurance & quality control | ASQ
• Measuring customer satisfaction
  • Survey questions collect data on evaluation indicators, to answer evaluation questions.
  • Feedback surveys
  • User acceptance test (UAT), or beta test
    • Close to end of development
    • Go through critical user journey
• Data-driven Framework
  • DMAIC
  • PDCA
• Turning project to program
• Retrospectives

Data

See Data Science for more info.

Gathering

• Productivity metrics: tasks, milestones, projection, duration, on-time completion rate…
• Quality metrics: Number of changes, issues, cost variance, customer satisfaction score
• Adoption metrics: conversion rates, time to value (TTV), onboarding completion rates, frequency of purchase…
• Resources
  • A Comprehensive Guide To Project Management Metrics | Wrike
  • Data-Driven Project Management: The 4 Most Important Data Points to Look At | Top 5 Project Management
  • Project Analytics: Benefits, Challenges and First Steps | EcoSys
  • Project Analytics to Improve Project and Portfolio Decision Making
  • Metrics for Project Management: How to Measure & Track Success | Adobe

Analyzing

• Prioritizing
  • What contributes the most to the outcome
  • What stakeholders care about the most
• 6 steps
  • Ask
  • Prepare
  • Process
  • Analyze
  • Share
  • Act

Presenting

• Storytelling
  • Define your audience
  • Collect the data
  • Filter and analyze the data
  • Choose a visual representation
  • Shape the story
  • Gather your feedback
• Visualization tools
  • Dashboard (KPIs, etc)
  • Burndown chart
  • Infographic
• See presentation for more info.

Leadership

• Team vs Work Group

  Factors of Team Effectiveness

  • Psychological safety — safe to take risks
  • Dependability
  • Structure and clarity
  • Meaning
  • Impact

• Team leader

  • Create system that turns chaos into order.
  • Communicate and listen.
  • Promote trust and psychological safety.
  • Demonstrate empathy and create motivation.
  • Delegate responsibility and prioritize.
  • Celebrate team success

• Provide air-cover

  • Saying “no” without explicitly saying “no”. Gently push back, but with explanation and an alternative.
  • Intervening from behind the scenes.

• Bruce Tuchman’s stages of team development

  1. Forming
  2. Storming
  3. Norming
  4. Performing
  5. Adjourning

• Steps to influencing (according to Jay A. Conger):

  1. Establish credibility
  2. Frame for common ground
  3. Provide evidence
  4. Connect emotionally

Communication

• Types of meetings
  • Project kickoff
  • Status update
    • Task updates
    • Schedule status
    • Budget status
  • Current or anticipated issues
  • Action items
  • Stakeholder review
  • Retrospective

Closing

• To close a project, ensure that:
  • All work is done.
  • All agreed-upon project management processes have been executed.
  • You have received formal recognition and agreement from key stakeholders that the project is done.
• Impact reporting
  • Highlight key performance areas
  • Use metrics to showcase results
  • Prepare an effective impact report presentation
• Closeout report
  • Executive summary
  • Key accomplishments
  • Lessons learned
  • Open items
  • Next step and future considerations