Project Management 2.0

Situation: You're developing a medial device and need to know where to focus your efforts.

Producing medical devices is a challenging business. You face huge compliance hurdles and constantly changing requirements in a field where innovation and speed are everything. With all of that going on, it’s difficult to take a breath and understand what your peers are doing. Here is a quick and easy way to identify best practices and better understand how you are performing against a standard set of benchmarks.

The 2013 Medical Device Development survey delves into the product development process, examining key metrics used to track progress and the management of tasks that can be a heavy drag on your project. Respondents are asked to identify areas they wish they could gain better visibility into, as well as the roadblocks damaging their success rates. The survey explores design, risk, and quality control topics—how these areas are managed, analyzed, and traced—before turning to the commercial tools used in the development process.

Requirements, test cases, and artifacts are also covered—how they are managed, which ones are tracked, and which are the most difficult to manage. Also, respondents are asked about proving compliance. What is the most difficult item to prove? How do you provide objective evidence with test cases, or verify that they were completed? This leads into questions about traceability matrices, including how they are created, what is traced, how they are kept updated, and more.  You can find the survey here.

Note: This survey is being conducted by Seapine Software, who is a sponsor of ProjectManagement.com .

Situation: You're compiling a project status report and need a quick audit of what you're doing.

Project Headway tasks offer a lot of guidance in managing your projects.  One popular feature of the process is "Questions you ask of yourself and others" within each task in the process. Compile Project Status Reports guides you through compiling status reports for your project.  These are the questions we've come up with for that task.  Please let us know if you feel they are helpful and/or what's missing.

When compiling status reports, consider asking yourself the following questions:

• Is there a status report template that can be provided to all team leads?
• How could you ensure each team lead understands how they are supposed to complete the status report?
• Is there a schedule in place to review status reports?
• Given the length of the project, how often should reports be required to be handed in? 
  • Weekly?
  • Bi-weekly?
  • Monthly?
• How will you track your team leads to ensure their status reports are being handed in and are complete?
• Have you created an agenda for your status meetings?
• Who on your team could take the minutes in your status meetings?

Ask a trusted colleague or key project team members the same questions. 

Situation: You're building a WBS and need a quick audit of what you're doing.

Project Headway tasks offer a lot of guidance in managing your projects.  One popular feature of the process is "Questions you ask of yourself and others" within each task in the process. Define Work Breakdown Structure guides you through building a WBS for your project.  These are the questions we've come up with for that task.  Please let us know if you feel they are helpful and/or what's missing.

When defining your WBS, ask yourself the following questions:

• What type of WBS has been used on previous projects?
• Has the larger team been included in the development of the WBS?
• Do the activities at the lowest level result in a tangible work product?
• Is there tight integration within the branches of the WBS? Are the activities and deliverables related?
• Can the cost, schedule and resource needs be effectively estimated?
• Is it defined at a level that you can confidently and effectively manage at?
• Can you turn the WBS into a manageable project schedule?
• Have required deliverable review and approval cycles been included?
• Have transitional and transformational activities been included?
• Have the lessons learned from previous projects been reviewed for possible impacts on the plan or approach to this project? 

Ask a trusted colleague or a key team member the same questions.

Situation: You need people who think broadly to make existing systems work, rather than simply deploying new ones.

A few days ago, I came across an HBR posting "Why your IT Project needs a Cognitive Scientist." . In a nutshell, the author says that in addition to technology-focused and business-focused folks, we need to have people who can look at problems in new ways and understand how the available information can be used to create something new and truly useful. He wraps up by saying that we need people who know:

• when to draw on data
• how to frame questions
• how to build hypotheses
• how to conduct experiements
• and how to determine results

These questions are useful to ask whether the business is depending on you for a breakthrough project or you're simply making the most of a more routine effort. Take a look at each member of your team. How do they measure up on each of the five points above? How could you help them improve?

Situation: You need a simple PM app that integrates with Google Calendar

I thought this one was a little different.  Most software is moving into the cloud, but the outer edge of that software spectrum contains the free email accounts that most of us have on Google.