Stories from my Life as a Technologist
Everyone dreams of talking to someone who can solve their problem. Opening up ways for Support team members to contribute to documentation and code will improve the customer experience and the company’s efficiency and we can prove it!.
Presented at Support Driven Expo 2022. Continue reading “Presentation: Everyone Can Contribute: Making Support Effective Through Contributions”
Often, to move up and get a higher pay, you have to become a manager, but not everyone is suited to become a manager, and sometimes given the preference, it’s not what someone wants to do.
Thankfully at GitLab, in every engineering team including Support, we have two tracks: technical (individual contributor), and management.
Continue reading “Choosing not to go into management (again)”
Lead by Rosalyn Metz, Becky Yoose
Not agile, because with a single person team, it’s difficult to do SCRUM, so only agile-ish.
Being with ‘what are we working on?” Have a meeting
This goes into helping to figure out the scope of the project.
5 why’s: basically, ask why 5 times. Everyone write down their answers. e.g. Want to redesign the website, but turns out because they don’t know what services are provided.
List of goals that you want to achieve, but what if you don’t know what your goals are?
Goal setting using SMART goals. Gives you a structure to work off of, and helps with project monitoring.
Also helps you narrow down your scope, and leads into project charter.
Goal vs. Task: More general, what needs to get done vs. implementation details
Examples:
Do this on your own or with someone trusted. Don’t do this with the stakeholders in the room.
You want to understand their place in the project, reason they’re there, the support they will provide.
If some people don’t need to be always be there, keep them up to date e.g. status report meetings. Take up little time, and do their influence. Be the protector for your team if need be.
Not everyone is going to be happy.
Make sure they’re in conversations up front, to see why it needs to happen. Will already have had the ‘why are we doing it this way’ conversations. See also Dealing with defensiveness in high conflict people.
If have unknown stakeholders, you might want to delay project until have all the necessary resources are in place.
This is your project charter. It covers
Your work then needs to be broken down. Need to break into the small tasks. e.g. Goal of teaching cohort -> registration, marketing, book space, etc.
Want to team to come up with tasks, but can help them.
One person might be responsible, but that person can decide how it gets done. Give people a couple of days and come back.
It’s okay where what you’re doing is preparing for the next project.
The majority of the time should be spent planning rather than the work.
It’s to create the schedule and understand the cost. Frequently realize it’s not worth it.
The only way to estimate time is to do time tracking. Might try Harvest.
Time tracking can be a real eye opener.
Tend to vastly underestimate or overestimate, so best to use buffers.
Choose a realistic buffer. Applying the percentage to the entire project. Usually start with 10-15%: T / (1 – B%)
Use Fibonacci numbers (1, 3, 5, 8 – never higher) to assign numbers, see SCRUM in 10 easy steps article. e.g. Do 16 points of work every week.
Difficulty seems to be not getting developers to track time, but staff people outside of IT to track time. Approach by making workflows more efficient, more realistic. You can play the dumb person and ask how long it takes.
Can ask your vendors whether they have a project plan.
cost = P1(hour * salary/hour) + P2(hours * salary/hour) + …
Important to keep track of meetings when tracking your time.
Use a spreadsheet to calculate cost of total, plus number of hours per week for each team member (and the cost). For example, if can only commit more than 20%, should not be spending 40 hours in a week on the project.
What do you track? It depends on who is funding the project.
If grant funded, depends on what is required based on the grant. Sometimes grants don’t cover certain things, or institution needs matching funding.
Internally, contact your supervisor, their supervisor, or contact person in another department.
The key is to keep it transparent.
Budget (spreadsheet) only one piece of reporting.
Have a communication plan (see example).
Team standing meetings meant to be very short. All people involved in that portion of the project say 3 things:
Informal, but technical = daily grind.
Status reports in comparison, regular, more formal, but regular
Reporting is absolutely necessary and needs to be clear, consistent, concise. Stakeholders feel like they’re involved in the project even if they’re not really.
A lot of people fall back to issue tracking system, is not a project management strategy.
Need to work out workflows around tickets. Are you going to use it for communication, time tracker? Customize system for that use which statuses, attachments, granularity, etc. Internal vs. external notes.
Who is responsible for which types of issues. Have primary and secondary contact.
Also, what is timely matter? Depending on during or outside of business hours.
May need to convince users to submit the information the new way. Talk to them about it not ending up in a black hole. Make sure have confirmation that issue has been added.
Need to also make sure the tickets are in scope. Go back to project charter if need to reference something.
Redmine
Basecamp
Trello
Github
JIRA
Different tools work at different organizations. Tools are only as good as the people that are using it. Need to be consistent about using it.
Do whatever you can to make it easier e.g. single sign-on.
When is it done? Met the outcome and objectives.
However, it doesn’t mean you can wash your hands of it.
Learn from your experiences. Take those lessons learned and apply into future projects.
Might be a presentation or report, template, etc.
Why did it go wrong? Some things that are external you cannot control, but internal things you can change.
Once you finish the project, you have a product.
While the project is done, you need to continue to maintain it.
Product owner = product manager. Lifecycle function dealing with planning, marketing, maintenance throughout the entire life of the product.
Product manager is the heart, mind and voice of the user. Not your own voice.
Have to make the hard product trade off decisions. e.g. which features to include.
Provide a second opinion on how things work. Create a trust relationship with the development team so you can ask questions.
See also, “How to be a program manager” and “on product management“.
The most important thing is communcation.
For the session, also see Erin’s notes for pm4lib, and little_wow’s etherpad notes.
Presented by Andrew McAlorum
As a whole, libraries do a bad job of managing IT projects and services. Agile and ITIL are two sets of frameworks or methodologies that can help with that. Continue reading “LibTechConf 2014: Agile Project Management and ITIL for Libraries”
That’s all for today.
