Project mantras

D. Murali - The Hindu - http://beta.thehindu.com/arts/books/article422603.ece

Information seeding is the third of ‘the seven mantras’ in ‘Steering Project Success: Simple innovations in execution’ by Madhavan S. Rao (www.tatamcgrawhill.com). Consistently seed information in the customer’s mind, proactively right from the beginning of a project, the author advises.

“This can be done through weekly or periodic status reports, conference calls, other customer interaction opportunities and internal team meetings. Seeding information will ensure that the customer and the team share the same understanding on the project execution details and milestones to be achieved.”

A scenario that Rao paints in this context is of an offshore team receiving a complete outsourcing project of a relatively large application. And the customer’s project manager (PM) wants that the challenging aspects of the SLA (service level agreement) be undertaken in the initial stage of the project.

“The offshore team explained to the customer’s PM the risks involved in doing the same. The team also convinced the PM that the SLA implementation should start only after the initial knowledge transfer phase. The team provided information and convinced the PM about the negative impact if the SLA was implemented in the initial stage of the work,” reads the ‘approach’ that Rao recommends.

Bug tracking

Another situation is of a product support project, in which the team found the number of reported bugs to be high owing to the complexity of the system, new releases and features. “It was difficult to track the status and progress of each bug since the backlog of defects was high…”

Here comes the relevance of a bug tracking system, a database containing the entire history of the bug, as the author instructs. The system – with info about priority, author, owner, target release, abstract and so on – can be updated through mails based on the bug ID, and communicated automatically to the identified recipients, he adds.

“The mails keep the team updated on the new bugs and the respective solutions. Include this as a process improvement so that the projects would have an automated bug tracking system for education and information seeding,” counsels a ‘takeaway’ box in the chapter.

Comfort levels

Mantra six calls for steering the comfort levels, such as enhancing the delight level of end customers. Sample this context, described by Rao: The customer, a bank, wanted to implement new software but wanted to retain the existing front-ends as the end users were comfortable with the same.

The software vendor began by seeking feedback from the users in the bank; finding that the user community was conversant and comfortable with the old screens, the vendor collected data from the front-ends of the old application and transferred the same to the database of the new application.

“Once the data transfer was completed, it was processed to retain the same front-ends on the new application. All this ran transparently.” And the outcome, Rao concludes, was that end-users’ comfort level could be kept very high, as they did not see any changes on the front-end screens of the new application.