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Trust and When You've Moved Their Cheese

The teams must trust the project manager if they are to work together effectively. If new practices have been introduced recently, it's probably more of an organizational change issue than an issue specific to project management itself. You moved their cheese!

You must establish trust with your teams and stakeholders before pushing them through change. If they are not bought in to you and the change beforehand, you will fail. As I wrote about in "New Project Manager: How to screw up in the first 60 days", flying in, cape waving to 'rescue' your team is not the right approach. It's a good way to screw things up by sending the message that you think the way they have been doing things in the past is stupid.

Tracking At The Right Level

I've also seen this happen when the project manager tries to get too fine-grained in terms of schedule and status updates. My personal opinion is that using details when planning and estimating is good, but trying to have that same low level of detail (especially in a waterfall environment) is going to drive teams nuts.

And frankly, that drives me nuts too.

When you have an agile process like Scrum or Kanban in place, it makes it much easier to go down to these lower levels of detail. This is because you are only worried about being able to visualize the work and make sure everything is getting done....if you try to ask team members to split hours worked across individual tasks, it can become very taxing quickly. Every minute your teams have to spend each day trying to track their time is a minute lost - but more importantly it's frustrating to do!

That level of tracking implies a lack of trust from management, and people start cracking jokes about which charge code to use from the time they leave their desk to the time they get to the meeting.

For example, in our last release one of my teams probably worked a total of 100 or so individual tasks. Most team members had no more than 4 'buckets' to split their time up with.

There is a level of tracking that adds value, and once you go down too deep the value drops off, and the overhead cost increases. Furthermore, the more confusing it is for your teams, the less accurate your time tracking will be.

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How to use Gantthead.com to find useful information quickly that is pertinent to your needs!

I'm going to ask you a question.

It's a simple question.

What is testing for?

Some people seem to think that testing is for display purposes only. These people would expect your testing phase to consist of showcasing your product instead of actually testing it.

I don't think so I think the best definition of true testing is this: Try to break the product.

That's right, the only value in testing your product is to try to poke as many holes in it as you can.

If you're testing phase consists of trying to look good in front of your customer, your stakeholders, your sponsors, then you are doing it wrong.

Get this. Earlier this week I was actually asked this question. "Next time, could we do integration testing before the official integration testing?"

That's right folks. We are talking about testing before we do testing. How sad is that?

Now let me make sure I'm clear.

We did dry run testing before the official testing. So it's not that we didn't test fully, or have ample preparation before the official testing. No, this is about looking good politically in a testing cycle.

This type of showmanship has absolutely no place in effective project management.

Period.

My teams and I do Kanban within a waterfall program.

This means that we have release cycles that start out with some investigation and detailed planning, move into true development, and then we have an Integration & Test process at the end of each release to go through.

A struggle we've had is that our value stream changes each time we transition from one phase of the waterfall cycle to another.

Furthermore, when in the Integration & Test phase, there is a specific tool we a required to use to work off what we call Test Descrepancy Reports (TDRs) which are basically bugs we find in testing.

At first, we would use a separate kanban board for the I&T phase, which maps the value stream of that process. However, due to the requirement of using a specific tool, it became a wasteful process to try and use both.  We had to keep both updated.

So in those cases, we dropped the kanban board - everything else was the same, but the visualization and mapping of a value stream went away for that portion of our work.

Has anyone else ran into a similar experience, with Kanban or something else, where a tool made a difference in terms of how you could work as a team?

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Felicia, I respectfully disagree with your instructor.

Even now while you are working on your Bachelor degree, and immediately after, I recommend you focus on gaining experience. After you have a few years of experience, you can make a better decision about what certifications or advanced degrees, if any, to pursue.

The truth is, you are much less likely to get hired as a project manager with a masters degree and no experience. You will be much better of building your experience base.

I’ve written quite a bit on how to gain experience when you are new to this field, and produced in-depth training on the topic as well.

For posts I’ve written, and please read the comments too:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Apmstudent.com+experience

And my my on-demand training:

http://learn.pmstudent.com/project-management-career-coaching

I hope that answer helps Felicia.

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