Teachable Moments: Time and Planning

Travis McLane, PMP has 21 years of experience with the Florida Department of Health and has functioned in the role of project manager for the past three years. With more than 12 years of software testing and business analysis experience, Travis has a strong background in user software training and over 18 years of classroom, virtual teaching, and software help desk management experience. Travis is certified in software testing, business analysis, and project management certifications.

  Estimating  

Teachable moments are formed when you have done something--regardless of the outcome--and learned from the experience. Learning makes us better at what we do and provides a great opportunity to develop others and sharpen skills. We’ve compiled our best Teachable Moments from our community members for you to learn from and share with other project managers.

Our team is currently working on various features for our web application. Included in our development backlog was the request to build a reporting tool. This new feature was something that our organization had desired for several years. This tool would be similar to functionality already included in our web application, but different in the complexity that it would consist of.

The original specifications provided to our team consisted of between 750 and 1,000 new fields. Our two main stakeholders were influential members of a statewide consortium who, because of their expertise, were tasked with providing the specs. Our team focused on the feedback received during design sessions with these two stakeholders and developed the new functionality within a few months.

As we entered into the initial beta test phase, I left it up to one of the two major stakeholders to identify and form the beta test participants. Needless to say, the beta test provided little feedback and thus no progress was made. So I …

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