The Project Managers Dream
?? Brent W Peterson
Founder @ Content Basis | Founder at Wagento (Acquired) | eCommerce Maestro | AI Dabbler | LinkedIn Top Voice | EO Member | 30x Marathoner (Still Slower Than I'd Like) | Recovering Mullet Enthusiast
Over the last couple of years I have been speaking in public about client expectations. In doing this I have always pushed our internal team to work with clients and to communicate expectations as often as possible. I recently had a long drawn out conversation with one of our project managers on the fundamentals of project management and we spent a lot of time debating small points, edge cases and things that may or may not happen. The really productive part came as I asked more and more questions.
Eventually I came up with the following three fundamentals so that we can respond to a client at anytime: (I am very interested in your feedback)
- What work we are doing and know about? (The time to complete items in a backlog)
- What work are we waiting for more info and can't estimate or that we can't answer but can report to the client that we know about this item?
- What work don't we know about and therefore can't estimate? (Magic things that only Leprechauns or Fairies can answer)
On any project and anytime we should be able to address these three questions and report to the client. In addition we can report these three conditions to the client on a weekly basis so everyone is in tune with the status of the project. I believe these are the three main items that can always be addressed.
Are there more?
What have others done to make sure they can answer questions about a project at anytime?
What are addition KPI's* that could be addressed at the highest level?
*Key Performance Indicator
Global MDM & PIM Excellence
9 年Possibly sub-questions of 1 or 2. What work is requiring client feedback/approval? What in the vendor queue is blocked by these outstanding approvals?
E-Commerce Consultant / MarTech Engineer at Yawiss
9 年I like and find very useful Gene Kim's Four Types of Work: 1) Business Projects (your own or your clients'), 2) Internal Projects (hardware/software updates, maintenance etc.), 3) Changes (alterations/amendments requested to be done to previously committed work) and 4) Unplanned Work (outages, unexpected errors). Too many Change requests probably means you didn't get your project specs defined very well. Too many Unplanned Work issues and it probably means the quality of our deliverables was too low. There must be a balance between all 4. Having a good insight in all 4 means you can plan better, get better velocity and happier customers.
E-commerce Solution Architect ( Magento 2 / Shopify / MACH )
9 年i need that cup