How To Manage A Project When It's Over!?

How To Manage A Project When It's Over!?

Just because your project is live, it doesn’t mean it’s over. One of the most overlooked parts of a project is post launch, after it’s gone live. In the moment of excitement it's finally completed (or just plain relief) of delivering a project, managing its closure should be considered just as important as the start of it. Here are ten tips for digital/ IT project managers to help you manage your projects effectively in the post-live phase of the project life-cycle. Managing projects effectively in this phase isn’t just a nice to have, it’s essential!

1. Don’t stop smoking

(Smoke testing that is...) The first thing to do when a project goes live, is to make sure that it is actually live, check the developers didn’t get over-excited halfway through and forget to finish deploying it properly. You’ll be amazed how often a seemingly straight forward deploy from staging to production goes wrong. Check the live project. Then check it again. And again. Keep checking. You need to continue to smoke test well after the project has gone live and as part of that, do any regression testing to ensure that your project’s deployment hasn’t adversely impacted anything else.

2. Check the checklist

As a project manager the buck stops with you – you should be confident that everything is tickety-boo/ all the cogs fit together, in other words, everything is working correctly. Make yourself a checklist well in advance of the final production deployment so that you’ve got something to check back against – in it, think about the things that you can check to ensure that you’re 100% sure that the project is working as it should.

3. Ramp down the project team

Before everyone forgets about what they’ve just built, make sure the project is closed properly from an administrative perspective. Check that the everyone has put their files on the server and that those folders are in order. Create archives for old files and ensure final versions are clearly labelled. From a development standpoint, check that code is commented, that the team Wiki is up to date. It’s amazing how much you’ll appreciate this 6 months later, when you’ll save yourself hours of trawling through the server when a client asks you for a random files that your designer has totally forgotten about.

4. Be clear about when it’s over

So you’ve completed smoke testing, your checklist is complete, the admin is buttoned up and you’re happy the project is complete? Now draw a line in the sand. The scope of work document should clearly define when a project is complete and all in-scope deliverables are delivered. When the immediate bug fixes are complete, it’s important that you don’t start adding in last minute feature requests before first doing some proper analysis. Some of the biggest and worst mistakes to projects are made trying to make quick fixes to a project in the days just after it has gone live when clients realize that perhaps they didn’t get all the stakeholder approvals that they thought they had received. Invariably, this kind of botch job leaves the site UX (user experience) or design severely compromised as knee-jerk reaction changes are made that aren’t thought out particularly well.

5. Test and analyse

Instead of trying to make botched quick fixes, be a bit more strategic. It’s time to start thinking about next steps. How is the project performing against the KPI’s – to what extent is it getting results? Most importantly, explore if the project is properly solving the original business objectives and evaluate whether users do what they need to do with ease. Talk with client stakeholders, use focus groups,user testing and analytical identify any issues and explore opportunities to optimise the project.

6. Create a road-map

When you’re clear about the issues and opportunities, create a road-map to carefully define the sequence of implementing them. If you’re not careful you’ll end up with a mishmash of change requests with no particular structure. Instead, plan it out taking into consideration the client’s budget and the importance rather than the perceived urgency of the changes. Start with the quick wins and plan out the bigger opportunities and enhancements so that the client knows what they can expect, when.

7. Optimise, analyse. Repeat.

Got the road-map approved? Now start implementing each of the enhancements. It’s important that the analysis, road-map and optimisation cycle continues on the project even after the initial road-map is completed. It’s often at this stage that the priority shifts from function to content in terms of optimisation. Explore the project’s ongoing content strategy; how is the project going to continue to be sticky, useful, interesting and rewarding? Now repeat it!

8. Do some digging

Hopefully you’ve been keeping your project status report up to date, right up to the end of the project. Look at the original estimates and compare them against actual estimates. By the time you’re deploying to live it’s unlikely that there’s any opportunity to submit any change requests, but dig around to ascertain where the project came in on budget, and which areas went above or below. If any departments spent more or less than estimated, and ask yourself the difficult questions – ‘why did we go over budget’, and ‘how can we prevent this from happening again in future?’ It’s also important to be transparent and share the information with the client too so they can understand for future projects why things are estimated the way they are.

9. Review and learn

If we’re going to become more effective project managers, an important step in every project is to learn from it. Post project reviews are essential. From an agency perspective it’s key to analyse what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what can be improved on for next time. To do this it’s key to learn from everyone who was involved in the project, including the client. Make sure you document that information in a post project review to help you learn from it for future projects and circulate it to the rest of your PMO. Ask yourself how these learnings should shape future projects and the way you manage them with your team.

10. Give yourself a pat on the back

Lastly, but importantly, celebrate your success with your team and your clients. Donuts are good. As much as it’s been hard work for you, don’t forget the effort that they’ve put in too. And don’t forget to enter your project into some awards!

Hope this helps, if your currently looking for advice in your next career move or curious on what jobs are out there, feel free to get in touch today on 02072582393 or email at [email protected]