Project Management Best Practices

Leading a project to successful closure requires right combination of skills, experience and confidence. Here are some guiding principles to execute projects smoothly :

Why Adopt Best Practices?

•          We want to deliver the right solution within defined timelines
•          We want to Identify problem areas at an early stage and take corrective actions
•          We want to bring efficiency, effectiveness, standardization, and predictability to our delivery model

  Best Practice: Adopt the Agile Mindset

• Create an enabling environment & empower your team members to work independently with responsibility & ownership
•  Promote upfront, open communication
• Best output can be achieved only when people enjoy what they are doing , help them understand the value of their work
• Any process which does not add value to project needs to be re-evaluated
• Believe in incremental evolution: to build a perfect artifact it may have to go through several iterations

  Best Practice: Understand your project Objective

• What is the main objective of the project? What are the key success criteria for Business?
• What are the current pain points /challenges business is struggling with and how is this project going to help overcome those challenges?
•  How does this project deliverable fit into the Business Road map?

Examples for some of the drivers for your project :

·         Competitive edge, rich user interface, rich content, quick & easy maintenance of site, real time content updates

  Best Practice: Define your Constraints / Risks

• Do you see a gap in requirements understanding?
• Do you need to deliver in a squeezed timeline?  Example: Business demands "Go live" within next 4 months
• Is your team geographically distributed? Are there any challenges within teams? Dependencies within teams. Example: Design team onshore and tech team offshore
•  Are there any third-party dependencies?  Example: integrations like social plugins, sales force, loyalty, etc
• Do you have the right team structure for each track of activity?  Example: Enough QA, design strength
•  Are there any activities that are beyond your scope but are going to affect you?  Example: Content population, translation, data migration

  Best Practice: Plan Upfront

Plan for the following upfront :

• What are your high-level timelines? How are you going to divide the work in iterations?  
• What are the roles and responsibilities of each team member? What are the external dependencies?  
• How do you plan to communicate with different stakeholders
• What are the tools that you are going to use and for what purpose?  Eg: tools for tracking, bug management, requirement management, project planning, etc
• What are the activities that can be automated?  eg: Quality check, deployment, performance analysis, etc
• What best processes and engineering practices can you implement to bring efficiency to the team?
• What are the environments you will require for your project execution and when? eg: dev, qa, prod, staging, etc
• How are you going to track and report progress? 
• How will you manage RAID? 
• How will the scope be managed? 
• How will you track Quality and defects 
• How will your user stories flow from inception to completion 
• Team Ramp up planning 
• Team Building, Feedback & Appreciation Framework  

  Best Practice: Define Checkpoints at every stage

<<Coming Soon >>

  Best Practice: Lookout for warning signs

Lookout for potential problem areas. The earlier the problems are detected the easier it is to manage them.

Warning signs may include :

•          A small variance in schedule or budget starts to get bigger, especially early in the project
•          You discover that activities you think have already been completed are still being worked on
•          You need to rely on unscheduled overtime to hit the deadlines, especially early in the project.
•          Deliverable quality or service quality starts to deteriorate
•          Approvals for deliverable not received on time can impact ongoing work

  Best Practice: Define the Review Process

Identify SME for each track and ensure that the following activities are reviewed & improved at appropriate times:

•          Requirement definition / Story definition
•  Ensure that the quality of the story is good. It captures all the information required. Does it specify Acceptance criteria clearly? is it calling out Dependencies or integration Details?
• Review by senior BA, Tech Team for quality of the story
•  Review by Product owner
•          Visual Designs ( UX /VD)
•          Review to ensure technical feasibility & conformity with development standards
•          Review by Senior Designer for quality of work
•          Review and approval By the client before it's passed on to the development team
•          System Architecture & Design
•          Review by Senior Architect
•          Review & Approval by Client
•          QA Activities - Test Cases, Defect Descriptions
•          Review of strategy by QA Manager
•          Review by the QA Manager for each Sprint
•          Is our QA Plan covering all areas: functional, regression, creative, usability, etc
•          Development
•          Code Review by Architect for each Sprint
•          Automation of Code review if possible
•          Coding Guidelines: review by Senior Architect
•          Functional review by BA for each sprint
•          QA review during development to identify gaps upfront
•          Creative Review by the Design team for each Sprint
•          Full Regression testing ( For all scopes delivered to date ): preferably Automat it
•          Build & Release process
•          Review the Release process for efficiency
•          Review if we have clearly defined branching & merging strategy

  Best Practice: Project Tracking

Develop Metrics to cover the following for each sprint :

·          

·          

·         Total Estimated effort VS total burned effort VS total effort required: this will help you predict

·         Number of defects in each sprint: Area of defects: functional, UI, Code review, etc

These metrics will help in doing objective progress checks

  Best Practice: Do Retrospective & improvise

A Retrospective should be done after each iteration to identify

•          Improvements in processes
•          Technical Improvements/learnings
•          Improvement in testing
•          Communication & Planning

These should be used as a guiding principle to improve for future sprints. Also, these learnings should be passed back at the organizational level for broader benefits.