Blog for Project Management Practices by Pravin

The present scenario developed, where every industry, business, and individual is suffering due to the Corona virus 2019 threat. Governments are doing locked downs/shutdowns. People are restricted to their homes. Offices are closed. Those who are not in the profession of saving lives are closed. We all have to support this as there is nothing important then saving lives.

A tough scenario, definitely not going to be forever for sure but organizations are making sure to pass this time and trying to minimize the risk of financial impacts. Projects are at risk. Everyone is sent to work from home incurred additional challenges to companies.

In this situation, forcing some challenges to organizations as given below but not limited to:

• Timely Delivery
• Reporting Requirements
• Motivation
• Delayed customer invoices

The organizations, who are more to work from office culture, having challenges in coordinating, implementing and adopting the new culture work from home, however, there is no other option.

Managers need to ensure to minimize these challenges using some of the basic steps from project management or PMBOK. Let’s keep to the basics of setting weekly targets, breaking them into daily and tracking religiously. Set some ground rules to have a daily stand up (for those still not Agile) and end of the day have a Daily work summary.

Once you have the consolidated daily work summary spend some time reviewing the output and highlight the common issues. The common issues could be requirements, support, network or it could be the availability of resources. Set the resolution plan for issues and plan for the next day.

Speak to your team daily keep them motivated to praise the good work and do not forget to give input to improve.

I hope to see things better soon till then lets work towards mitigating the business risks and ensure minimal impact on deliveries.

Working in Software development environment as leaders, all of us faced the issue of defects, which are Reopen by Testing and Quality teams.

Why it is important to address the reopen defects?

Being in Software development everyone comes across the reappearing of the defects declared fixed by the development team. It is important to address the reasons behind reopen as quickly as possible to avoid more defects appear in this category. Fixing of Reopen defects always takes extra effort and cost. It is called Rework.

Reopen defects may cause:

• Delay in delivery
• Efforts overrun
• Schedule overrun
• Risk of impacting other items while fixing reopen

While considering the reason to address Re-open defects. One of the most important exercises, which is very essential to target reopen defects,  this exercise is called a causal analysis of re-open defects.  

Root cause analysis gives the idea about where improvements needed while looking into possible reasons for reopening.

• Inadequate QA coverage.
• Incomplete Implementation.
• Non-adherence of process/causing gaps.
• Lack of technical knowledge.

Root cause analysis without corrective actions is a futile exercise. The below table gives a more pictorial representation of linking root causes and action items.

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There are always ways to motivate, appreciate and provide recognitions apart from financial gains. At high level, it looks challenging and below article has some of these points.

I have tried to divide these ideas into two parts, one, which may not require the organization policy changes and second, which require support from organization or at some level policy change.

No change in organization policy – Certainly managers can adopt some ways to motivate team without making any financial impact to organization as well as no policy change. These are as follow:

Encourage and appreciate the good work

Many leaders avoid praising small wins and appreciating small achievements.  However, regular appreciations and recognitions of good work motivates the resources and encourages others to follow. During daily or weekly meetings, say some good words to your team members, who has done excellent work last week. People always remember small gestures and token of appreciations.

Allow resource to grow and learn

 If you are working on technical/software project, you find many challenging situations, where you have to find the solutions. You know that your team does not have that skill; you may want some of your team members to learn it. So allow them to take the challenge and explore. Allocate some time for their learnings. This is going to motivate your team and they would love to work more for you. Send your resources to trainings and make a training plan align with your organization training plans. Give them opportunities so they can learn new things.

Encourage your team to choose their strategy

There are situations, where people follow strict guidelines and fixed rules. In fact, some managers have their own way to doing certain things, allowing your team or resources to follow their approach and complete the task gives encouragement to team and resources. This develops a kind of trust and reliance within team. This motivates people.

Adopt ways to motivate people, where organization policy change is required. There are ways to motivate people apart from financial gains, which may require organization policy changes. These are as follows:

Allow to work in flexible timings

Project Leads clearly know, who the best performers are and who can work more dedicatedly and happily in project. Most committed people on project spend more than average time over the project; they try to give as much as possible. You really want them to be productive all days.  Allowing them to come little late on any day would help them to recover the stress. This small step can help in motivating such resources. No doubt, there are organization policies and no one wants to break the rules so discuss with your HR and find a way to implement it

Giving time-off short leaves after a major delivery

After working on a tight deadline and completing the tasks, everyone would love to have a time-off or a short break. This helps people to rejuvenate and enjoy after the hard work they have put in. People do take leaves for their personal work and many traditional leaders would put this argument but time is changing so the ideas of motivation and appreciation. I am sure a short leave should not affect the schedules and delivery of projects. Think about it and discuss with your HR to find better ways to implement it.

I hope you found this topic helpful and beneficial. Your comments are welcome to refine these ideas.

Tips to make a presentation effective

Being in IT there is always a need to present multiple things to variety of audiences. It could be a business presentation, a technical design, introduction to processes or launching of a product.

Core objective of your presentation is always to deliver the right information to people in right amount. This write-up has some tips all about this. There are learning and tips got from time to time from my superiors and seniors referred here.

Before starting, it is important to chalk out the plan and outline your presentation. Even before starting any visuals or slides. There are some basic steps must be gone through:

--What is the subject of presentation?

--Who are all and how many audiences?

--Are you presenting over Net meeting or in front of audiences etc.

Here you go with some tips:

1. Study the subject well and before building the presentation.
2. Decide on a right tool to create visual aids, slides etc.
3. Total duration of presentation divided by number of slides gives the minimum time you must need to spend on any slide.So plan it well.
4. Always start the presentation with an introduction, background and objective of the presentation. This is to have attention and building rapport with audience.
5. Never forget to remind audiences that you will be covering questions at the end of the presentation Or they may ask questions any time.
6. Do not stay on one slide or visual over longer than expected time until there is a huge interest generated among audiences over that slide.
7. Prepare for cross culture or language issues. Use the most common and easy to understand words. You must note that audiences can be from across the globe with different dialects and pronunciations.
8. Rehearse the presentation multiple times.
9. Present day trends do not recommend reading from slides so use cheat seat.
10. During presentation always, confirm audience, if they are getting sufficient sound and visibility. This is more important in online presentations.
11. Ask questions to audiences time to time so they feel engaged.
12. Always ask audiences to ask questions to make presentation useful. More questions and comments indicate the clarity delivered.
13. Always include your contact details over presentation or leave the business cards, you know sometimes people are hesitant to ask questions in group they may shoot interesting questions offline.
14. Never forget to thanks your audiences for their time.

More in next blog…Happy Presenting!

Pravin Kumar Shrivastava

[email protected]

 [email protected]

Communication is the key to success of any engagement, whether it is a Project Management, Program Management, relationship, presentation or even a still picture.

A technical view of what is communication before exploring more:

“Communication is an exchange of facts, ideas, opinion, emotions by two or more persons.” [Source Newman and Summer, Business Communication and Executive Effectiveness, Symbiosis Center for Distance Learning.]

Diagrammatic representation of Communication as taught in schools:

In nutshell, Communication is an art to transform any idea to Receiver and generating Response.

Some more lights on types of communications

-Written: emails, proposals, letters, memos and reports

-Verbal: Speech, lecture, presentation..etc

-Body Language: Facial expressions, Eye contacts, Gestures, Appearance

Why communication effective is important?

• To transform ideas in correctly to produce results
• To get objective or goal achieved as desired/planned
• To let vision transforms into reality
• To let receiver gets the right message with right emotions and feelings

Now, the key of the whole conversation! How a communication can be effective? Some of the tips from my experience:

• As you the source media is a key of entire communication process, so use the right medium and carrier to communicate e.g. If HR wants to communicate change in office timings, it cannot be through notice boards or verbal, it has to reach to each one definitely so send it through memos or emails.
• Communication should be precise having sufficient content to explain the subject, matter, action and post action need.
• While presenting, speak in a subtle tone, constant pace and take appropriate pauses. Prepare well in advance to avoid stupid flow mistakes.
• While in person formal communications make eye sustained eye contact, speak to the point; make positive gestures, my favorite keep Head High Shoulder Back!
• While presenting, use pictures, signs rather texts to convey idea. A diagram can explain the concept in seconds than reading multiple bullets.

One good thing always remember… “A man is identified by dress and address”.

Comments invited. More to come in next blog….Effective presentation skills.

Happy Communications!