Ciarán Hanway's Blog

What Not to Do - Project Management Mistakes to Avoid

2008-11-25T08:43:00Z

I'm a big fan of lists. Heck - show me a project manager who isn't a fan of lists! I'm especially fond of lists that explain how not to do something. This way, I feel as though I'm learning from the expensively-gained experience of others.

The list isn't meant to be exhaustive and isn't meant to be in order, but I hope this list proves useful to someone, somewhere:

Mistake #1:Keep the team and the stakeholders apart - I've worked in some (large) organisations where the lead developers are on good drinking terms with the Directors. I've worked in other organisations where there has been a wall of separation between the people who have the business vision and those who actually need to build the tools to deliver that vision. In one memorable case, the only contact the team was permitted to have with stakeholders was a set of documents written by business analysts from another part of the business. Of course there always has to be a balance struck between proper use of time and the importance of the project, but communication, especially at the outset of a project, is vital.

Mistake #2: Communicate infrequently - If the project is important, people will be interested and should be asking as much as being told how the project is progressing. Frequent, early communication allows for project plans and budgets to become exposed to real life challenges and be up for discussion. Early communication allows stakeholders to see what they're getting and reject or change it early. Frequent communication builds up an important level of trust: that the stakeholders care what the team is doing and that the team is doing its level best to deliver what the stakeholders need. This trust is a useful currency for when the challenges come later in the project.

Mistake #3: Save all your testing until the last minute - If you're running an agile project, you're likely to be testing every 2-4 weeks, depending on the length of your sprint. "Fail Early" is the philosophy here. If you're doing things in a traditional waterfall manner, you're probably hoping that there'll be only a handful of defects revealed during your testing phase. Consider instead breaking your project into a series of mini-waterfalls that will allow your testers to get on the case as early into the development process as possible.

Mistake #4: Don't tell a client when they're wrong - The client has brought you in for a reason, so you shouldn't be afraid of making suggestions on how to best set up the project for success. Of course, there are diplomatic ways of doing this, and it helps to know when to exercise discretion.

Mistake #5: Put the client on the critical path without telling them - Working in collaboration with a client means that very often, you're dependent on them for things like servers, meeting attendance, approval etc. Make very clear up front just what you need from the client and when you'll need it by. If you're nervous, keep it on the risk log for regular review with the client (you're doing that, aren't you?)

Mistake #6: Focus on contracts not collaboration - Something unexpected always happens in a project. If things go very wrong, there's always a temptation to throw blame around and cover your back. It's just the human thing to do. It's also the wrong thing to do. Both you and the client have a lot invested in a project; financially, emotionally and in terms of career. It's in both your interests to find a way out of a problem together: fix the problem not the blame: focus on working together, rather than scoring contractual points and you'll be much closer to a positive result for all.

Mistake #7: Mix your methodologies - Are you running this project in Agile or in Waterfall? Does everybody share the same expectations about how the project will proceed and what their responsibilities are? A common mistake for newcomers to Agile is to fix your time, scope and cost on a project, which is fine if you have contingency, but Agile doesn't work like that. Similarly, people who have dipped a toe in the Agile water and have decided it's not for them often take the bits they like, such as the great flexibility in accommodating changes to requirements, and try to apply this to Waterfall - this is dangerous because waterfall projects, by their non-iterative nature, don't allow for iterative changes without some significant upheaval or nimble footwork.

Mistake #8: Just get on with it and never look back - Make sure you kick your project off well. At no other time in a project do you get such a golden chance to motivate your team by sharing the vision with them, agreeing ways of working, setting expectations and understanding risks. Simillarly, take time throughout the project (and again at the end) to look back and see how you're all working, what to keep doing and what to do differently. Agile calls these moments retrospectives, but you can call them whatever you like.

Mistake #9: Extract every waking hour from your team - Overtime is quite often a fact of life, especially at the end of a marathon project. Overtime is demonstrated to give your team a performance boost in the short term, but carry this on indefinitely and you get burn out, a dip in quality and a loss of momentum. Swapping out burnt-out people is costly. Not to mention, it's not very nice to put people in this position in the first place.

Mistake #10: Never, ever change your plan - Again, this is where project management is as much art as science. Be risk averse: We project managers love risk and issue logs. Change is as often as not a good thing. If a plan changes throughout the project, it's a sign that it's being used, understood and reflects reality. If the plan isn't changing, perhaps nobody's actually following it.

Well, I had quite a few more than these 10, but I think I'll keep my powder dry for another post. Of course, I'd be very grateful for your comments and suggestions for the next 10.

Explaining the Internet to a Five Year Old

2007-07-30T09:08:00Z

I was having a chat with some friends the other day and we ended up talking about how one might describe the internet to a child.

One of my friends described how, whilst fixing his router, his flatmate's 5-year old boy asked him, "Why isn't the Internet in my computer anymore?". My friend was a little stumped by this question, so he asked the boy what he thought the Internet was. The boy replied, "Google". Funnily enough, we all pretty much joked that this was the sort of answer our parents would give too. So we started trying to come up with a nice simple definition he could give to the boy.

One of my friends, who hails from Israel, came up with this analogy:

Imagine your fingers are numbered 1-10.
You can touch each finger to another finger.
Imagine that one of your fingers is your computer.
You can touch a finger to the neighbouring computer-fingers on your hands, but you can also touch the fingers of other people anywhere in the world.
Touching fingers communicates with them and shares information with them.
If you can't directly touch another person's finger, you can pass messages through someone else.

Another, from Missouri, suggested: "The internet is computers in the world connected to each other, each computer can see stuff that is on the other computer".

One friend, from Glasgow suggested, "It's where daddy looks at ladies".

Another chap, from Croydon, suggested that we should think of tubes or pipes, with water flowing through them.

Of course, there's always wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet for those of us who like to skip through thinking about how we would define the internet and instead get our definitions ready-made. Well, I say "ready-made", but of course these ideas are "ready-made" by an ocean of users generating entries at a rate of 200 articles per day.

The other interesting thing about this whole conversation was the group of friends, and the way we were having the conversation. We've known each other for years and do things as a group very frequently. What's remarkable about them is that I would never have met them if it wasn't for the internet, and apart from meeting up with them in "Real-Life" a couple of times a year, most of our contact is over the Web. Our whole conversation was conducted in our own bulletin board forum. Perhaps this is what we should be using to explain the internet to a child - the internet is a place where people from around the world can share ideas, and build bridges to each other.

Conchango, Daily Mail and Vista: The eReader

2007-02-21T14:00:00Z

Conchango has been working intensively over the past two months with Microsoft and Associated Newspapers to create an application that allows users to to read the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday using advanced screen reading technology. The application launches today. It has been dubbed "The eReader".

The application is built on .NET3 and uses XAML and WPF for presentation.

We've been running a mixed team of Conchango and Associated staff at their palatial offices in Kensington. Lots of people at Conchango have been keen to be involved on the project as it has been very exciting to work on this new technology. Amongst them have been Howard van Roojen, Martin Rennie, John Rayner, Stuart Preston, Richard Wand, Hiia Immonen and Keni Barwick. Unsurprisingly, you'll probably notice that a few of these people have started blogging about WPF and Vista!

The project aims to place the Daily Mail at the vanguard of Vista (could I trademark this alliteration?). The Mail will be the only newspaper in Europe that fields an application of this kind for an exclusive period.

Some of you may recognise this kind of application from the New York Times Reader. It is based on the same technology as the NYT reader and we've been working with the same Microsoft team in Seattle that built the reflow and reading technology.

The eReader application allows a user to download and cache up to seven days news on his or her laptop/ tablet PC or Ultra-mobile PC. Minimum requirements are Windows XP SP2, a 1Ghz processor and a 512Mb RAM. Once the news is cached, it can be read even when not connected to the Internet and presents the news in a format that is easy on the eye and can be scaled to fit the device it is being read on. A "News in Pictures" feature allows the user to browse the news visually and then dive right into the story. Vista-only functionality includes a sidebar gadget and a "Speak the News" feature. Stylistically, it looks very like the Daily Mail, with a managed "tabloid feel" frontpage and Daily Mail fonts throughout.

The eReader project's been an intensive 2 months of work. We originally came in at the end of November and ran incredibly short sprints of initially 1-week each. This was because we were unsure of what the new technology was capable of and wanted to control the risk as much as possible. We moved onto 2-week sprints soon after we started. Even 2-week sprints are incredibly tough to manage and to work within. Balancing off short sprints with pretty large milestones has been an interesting opportunity to make good use of the sublime coffee shop here at Associated News.

For more information, please visit the Daily Mail eReader homepage.

World of Warcraft vs Second Life

2007-02-10T19:27:00Z

There has been some discussion in my dear colleague Anthony Steele's blog about World of Warcraft and online communities.

I'll confess now - I'm more of a fan of World of Warcraft (WoW) than I am of Second Life (SL), but whilst I think WoW will beat SL this time around (mainly because the content is so compelling), I think the suggestion that one should bet on one over another is specious.

Why?

WoW has great content and beautiful scenery, sure, but it follows a publishing model of having a tiny (compared to the playerbase) group of people making the content. The game can get repetitive, and there was a trend for people to leave the game in the months leading to the expansion release in January this year. Moreover, Blizzard has cut the price of the game from £34.99 to £14.99. Whilst expansions each year ad infinitum are promised, I'm not so sure this will happen once the subscriber churn hits a certain level.

SL's approach is to create a platform that people can use to create content. WoW is dependent on an army of developers to make the content for the players. Many of the players are frustrated that the WoW developers aren't listening to them and incorporating their ideas.

What we're learning from social computing is that user-generated content is what keeps people coming back for more and generates self-reinforcing network effects. Whilst the platform may become outmoded (the graphics that we're capable of viewing will always improve), the platform can be replaced and the community can migrate (as happens when MMOs die).

WoW and SL are very different and very similar. The former is a game with a community that has formed around it, partly because certain goals in the game are unachievable without teamwork and a community spirit. The latter is a community that has built a "game" around it, where there are no goals and the community is part of the raison d'être.

People increasingly want the freedom to make their own content. On the other hand, there are still a lot of people who want to be entertained and have content created for them.

I see the future moving more towards a hybrid model that incorporates the best of both World of Warcraft (excellent content whilst it lasts, good technical support and psychological devices to keep you coming back) and Second Life (massive flexibility in player capabilities, user-driven content, pay-as-you-go subscription model).

I don't know how incredibly fast our infrastructures will be, but perhaps this will become the way we see the Web - as a series of massive userbase, rich and immersive applications, places where you really can browse the shops, for example, with the boot-leather saving ability to fly between them...

Orange Movie Pitch: "Web 2.0 on a plane"

2006-09-04T15:54:00Z

I need to upgrade my personal mobile phone pretty badly. Conchango issue us with lovely Vodafone v1240 Smartphones, but I was looking out for a hot new deal to upgrade my tired old Nokia 6230.

I'm a typical web user. I want to get to my information quickly and with the minimum of navigation; so I ran a search on the Orange website, using the prominently positioned search bar at the top of the page.

The result of my search was surprising. I was offered a variety of links to sites other than the Orange site. I could buy an N80 from Three, Vodafone, The Phone Spot, O2. In fact, the Orange site helpfully pointed me towards an N80 from anyone but Orange.

Being a typical click first, think later web user, I had failed to notice that I had been searching the web through the Orange site. Orange are clearly trying to be helpful to their customers by including a web-search tool on their site. However, I don't think of Orange when I want to search the web. I think of Google. I don't think that in this day and age that it makes sense to assume that your ISP users will keep your homepage as their default.

I was going to say that there is no difference between going to the Orange site and, say, Freeserve. Of course that might be something to do with the fact that Freeserve was co-opted into the Orange brand. I remember the old Freeserve page well. It was fairly useful in 1999, but even then I skipped by it for dedicated content that I wanted.

It is all very well using your brand as a glorified Google advertising partner, but what if people stop coming to your site because you're not offering anything compelling or interesting in the first place?

So that is an example of a company not "getting", in terms of what users want, where the Internet is going, or just failing to see the need to keep up.

Compare this to New Line Cinema and their approach to "Snakes on a plane", the new vehicle for Samuel L. Jackson, famed for his profligate use of profanity at volume. A considerable buzz was generated on the internet after the title was discussed on a Hollywood screenwriter's blog in August 2005. Since then:

The title was changed from "Pacific Air Flight 121" back to its original working title of "Snakes on a Plane" after fan pressure.
Fans were inspired to create graphics for fictional movies about other animals in odd settings, such as "Bears on a Submarine" "Carnivorous Lions on an Overweight Middle Eastern Woman" and "Sharks on a Roller Coaster" (Tagline: You must be this tall...to DIE!).
Spoof auditions for the movie were filmed and shared through websites such as YouTube, Digg and IFilm.
A competition was organised to to write and record music videos inspired by the movie concept. The top 3 videos were featured on MTV, CNN, and MSNBC after being put on YouTube.
Filming wrapped in Septmber 2005. Although "Snakes on a Plane" had been a minor movie in New Line cinema's line-up, an additional five days of shooting was ordered in early March 2006. Contrary to the usual indication of problems with the film, this reshoot was to bring the movie in line with growing fan expectations. Among the additions is a line that originated as an Internet parody of Samuel L. Jackson's typical movie persona, which I don't need to rehearse on a family-friendly Conchango Blog!
The studio also opened the door, via a deal with Cafepress, to fan designs relating to the film including T-Shirts, mugs etc. The Studio actually permitted fans to become official licensees of Snakes on a Plane merchandise.

The overriding theme throughout the "Snakes on a Plane" marketing experience is that the studio (perhaps feeling like a gamble on a movie that wasn't their top-bill film that season), decided to involve the public and whip up some cheap publicity using viral marketing. This resulted in the actual content that the studio developed being amended due to user involvement.

In other words, the Studio made its movie-delivery platform available to the public. This harnessed the public's collective intelligence and both the studio and the public benefited.

This is precisely where the debate around Web 2.0 appears to be taking us. Concepts such as the Web as a platform, harnessing collective intelligence, user communities etc. are proving to add real value to the final delivered content. The movie itself didn't do too badly; although it didn't break any records, it is likely to turn in a decent enough profit and maybe become a DVD cult hit (the Samuel L Jackson posters seem to be selling well).

This is why although the Orange cinema adverts are funny, their site is pretty uninspiring. In contrast, Snakes on a Plane is an example, for textbooks we still have to write, of how new media is no longer just reflecting old, but how the process is becoming two-way.