Tag Archives: project management

How The Cost of Quality Increases On Your Project

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The cost to fix a defect increases as it gets closer to the Customer.

🤝 During Requirements: It costs very little to check, prototype and review requirements before we program them.

🤝 During Solution and Design: It costs relatively little to review and change a design.

🤝 During Development: It costs a bit more in time and effort to redo an item if it gets this far and there’s a defect. We may need to re-look at the requirements and design too, and re-code the solution.

🤝 During Testing: If we catch a defect during Testing, we may have to redo it in Development, or even go through the process from requirements again.

❌ But once a defect gets to a customer, we have the added cost of bad customer reviews, impacts to our brand or reputation, PLUS the time taken to review the customer complaints and address them, PLUS the waste of something we created that may have to be completely redone.

➡️ What else would you add to the Cost of Quality?

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How to Measure Business Value for Your Project (NPV, ROI and more!)

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Measuring Business Value

There are many ways to measure the business value you deliver as part of your project. Some of these ways are tangible (money, shareholder value, market share) and some are intangible (Brand recognition, goodwill, strategic alignment etc).

Ultimately the best value comes down to an improvement in some financial measure for your company, and these are measured in the following ways:

Cost-Benefit Ratio:

The cost-benefit ratio = the Total benefit of the project / Total cost of the project.

Choose the highest.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on Investment = the Project Return – Project Cost / Project Cost x 100.

Choose the highest.

Internal Rate of Return (IRR)

IRR is the return on your investment in a given time period.

Choose the highest.

Net Present Value (NPV)

Net Present Value = Today’s value of our expected return – Initial investment.

Choose the highest.

Payback Period (PBP):

The Payback period = The Cost of the project / Average Annual Return.

Shorter is better.

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Crowdstrike and Quality Management on a Project

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Why is Quality important in your project?

You probably heard about the Crowdstrike outage on the weekend of July 2024 that disrupted airports, banks and stores all around the world. It was caused by Crowdstrike pushing a system file full of zeros to production.

How can we avoid this sort of disaster as we manage our own Projects? There are many ways:

➡️ Peer review & Code Inspections: Checking the requirements with a user or reviewing the code with another Developer.

➡️ Continuous Integration: Merging changes into the main test system (often daily) with automatic tests.

➡️ Test Driven Development: Tests are written first, failed, then run again and passed after the solution is coded.

➡️ Unit Tests: Testing each small piece or User Story.

➡️ System Testing: Testing the integrated system as a whole.

➡️ User Acceptance Testing: Testing the system from the User’s point of view.

➡️ Regression Testing: Testing the existing system with the changes to see if they’ve impacted normal operations.

➡️ Production Verification Testing: Testing the change in the live environment after go-live then rolling the change back if it goes wrong.

➡️ Sprint Review: Demonstrating the actual change to the customer or senior users before release.

Quality is one of the 10 Project Management Knowledge Areas for a reason.

⭐ What are some of the ways you manage Quality on your own projects? ⭐

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The Change Control Process in Project Management

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Change Happens When Delivering a Project

There are many competing factors when delivering change with a Project. Not only do you have many competing stakeholders with their different needs, biases, history in the organization and more, but you have competing constraints too.

The triple constraint of Scope, Schedule and Cost is impacted frequently on a project. If scope changes a little, it might impact how long it takes to deliver it. And that might cost more. Balancing these is an essential part of being a good Project Manager.

Use Change Requests to Keep Change under Control

If you’re studying or working in Project Management this year, know the broad Change Control process.

So, so many project managers never even outline their Change Control approach – or worse – they confuse it with modern Organizational Change Management (transitioning a product to operations or BAU).

The good part is, you get to decide (with your stakeholders) your project’s Change Control approach and you outline this in your Change Management Plan.

YES this works for Agile too, but it’s usually just a single line as the Product Owner decides on Scope Changes with the Product Backlog, and they understand and absorb the impact to their Schedule (Cost is often fixed).

Make sure you know it. Make sure you write it down.

Then deliver value and win. The typical Change approach might be:

  1. A Stakeholder raises a change to the Scope, Schedule, Cost, Resources (or any other baselined part of the project).
  2. We note that proposed change in the Change Log.
  3. We analyze the impact of the change to our project Cost, Schedule, Scope, and any other necessary impact.
  4. We take this information to the Change Control Board, or the approver. This might be multiple people or just one person (i.e. a Project Sponsor or Product Owner).
  5. We communicate the outcome of the change to the necessary stakeholders (Approved, Deferred, Rejected).
  6. We update the Change Log with the outcome and take the necessary change action.

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Prototypes in a Waterfall or Agile Project

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Prototype First, Then Build With Less Risk

If you’re working in or studying Project Management, it is essential to know about Prototyping and the different types of prototypes you might use.

A Prototype is a small, low cost version of the real thing, so we can see if it works and whether we really want it.

The idea of Prototyping works in any form of project. We might build a house or a bridge using a sequential, step-by-step approach (such as Waterfall). The prototypes we’ll use on these projects might include architectural designs, blueprints, or 3D models created by a draftsman or engineer to help us see if the design will work.

In a software environment, it is common to create a storyboard or wireframe of the new system, so we can see if it flows well when we “use” it, and we can see if the design works for any customers that trial it.

These are the most popular Prototypes you’ll come across:

  • ✅ Mock-ups or Wireframes: A simple drawing or design of the new idea.
  • ✅ Process Maps: Connecting process steps with boxes so you can see how a new process will flow.
  • ✅ Storyboards: Connect your designs together to link as they would in the real item, as you navigate a new design.
  • ✅ Computer generated models (2D or 3D): Using Blender or CAD, or cardboard and glue, you can see it in more depth and make corrections early.

➡️ What are some other Prototyping methods you use in your projects?

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Good versus Bad Project Management

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What Does Good Project Management Look Like?

People often ask what the value of a project manager is. When Project Management is done well:

  • We meet business objectives
  • We can resolve problems and issues
  • We can satisfy stakeholder expectations
  • We manage the project constraints (Cost, Schedule, Resources, Scope)
  • We can identify, recover or terminate failing projects.

However, when Project Management is done badly, it soon becomes very obvious. Have you ever been on a project where it is not being run effectively? You might see:

  • Cost Overruns
  • Missed deadlines
  • Poor Quality and rework
  • Unsatisfied stakeholders
  • Uncontrolled expansion of the project scope
  • Failure to achieve the project objectives
Use the Project Manager Competency Triangle to Win:

There are three major areas of competency that a Project Manager needs to ensure they stay on the “Good project management” side of the equation. They are:

  1. The Project Management Process
  2. The Business Environment
  3. People Skills

We need the Project Management Process (from the PMBOK Guide, 6th Ed or the Process Groups Practice Guide) so we know all the steps to effectively delivering value and change.

We need knowledge of the Business Environment because we need to understand the value that we are delivering, and be able to help the team solve problems as they arise.

Lastly we need People Skills in order to build and grow an effective team, manage stakeholders and their expectations, lead as well as manage, shield the team from external politics, and ensure everyone is doing their part.

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Benchmarking: How To Do It

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Benchmarking is a Great Way to Find Product Ideas

If you’re a business owner, manager, or a Product Owner or Product Manager you’ll often be on the lookout for new product ideas or ways to improve your business.

One of the best ways to do this is with Benchmarking.

Benchmarking is comparing your current product or process to a similar product or process in another team or organization. It doesn’t have to be in the same industry – some of the best ideas can come from similar things but in completely different fields.

The steps to Benchmarking are:

  1. Select the process you want to improve,
  2. Select the organization or team you want to compare to,
  3. Document your current process,
  4. Collect data and compare your process to other organizations,
  5. Plan and implement the changes,
  6. Review the results, and repeat.

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Project Benefit Types – Tangible and Intangible

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What Type Of Benefits Does Your Project Have?

Projects are temporary, and they deliver something new – a change and business value. Many executives forget about the “business value” part though, and instead focus on:

  • Doing business with a company because their friend / partner / spouse owns it,
  • Adding the latest system just because it is currently trending,
  • Doing a project because you need to spend the budget you have before the end of the year.

Those things don’t inherently add business value. Instead, there are two types of business value we can be aware of when delivering a change or a project.

Tangible Value

This is something physical that we can see making a difference directly. It usually comes down to money. It could be:

  • Increased monetary assets
  • Increased market share
  • Increased stockholder equity
  • Increased revenue or profit

It might be directly more customers, or figuring out how to increase customer value, or reducing the customer acquisition cost.

It is something we can measure directly.

Intangible Value

Intangible value is harder to measure. We know we are adding value, we know something is increasing, but it is hard to see how it directly affects the bottom line of our department or company. It might include:

  • Brand recognition
  • Goodwill
  • Reputation
  • Strategic alignment

We might see how many people have seen and can recognize our brand, but we won’t know the real difference it has made until we can see an improvement to our bottom line.

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Project Management Key Concepts (in Pictures)

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Cost Reserves (Contingency, Management):

Types of Project Benefits (Tangible, Intangible):

Three Types of PMO (Supportive, Controlling, Directive):

Roles on a Scrum Team:

Project Development Lifecycles:

Agile Estimating:

Estimating Types and Ranges:

The Three Cs for creating User Stories:

INVEST for creating User Stories:

Types of Estimating (Analogous, Parametric, 3-point, etc.)

Push Communication and Pull Communication:

The Five Cs of Communication

Resource Smoothing and Resource Levelling:

Schedule Fast Tracking and Schedule Crashing:

Types of Power:

The Cost of Quality:

Cost of Quality

Tuckman’s Ladder (the Tuckman Model for Team Development):

Tuckmans Ladder

Adaptability and Resiliency:

Adaptability and Resiliency

Adaptability and Resiliency

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Adaptability and Resiliency

Projects are hard. But they can be easier when you and your team are Adaptable and Resilient.

The good news? You can improve both of these things.

Adaptability is responding positively to changing conditions.

Resiliency is absorbing impacts to recover quickly from a setback.

Having a solid foundation (like an emergency fund in your home Budget, or a career skill that is in high demand) will help you with both.

 

– David McLachlan

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