KISS for Successful Project Engagements
In this competitive digital economy, successful projects in software development are often glorified, rewarded and showcased, sometimes beyond what they deserve. More often than not, the not-so-successful projects and project teams experience punitive repercussions. This drives a sense of risk averse and a conservative approach to all future opportunities rather than leveraging failures as learning opportunities. It cannot be any worst in an organization that other teams walk the same path and meet the same fate.
Projects that are not-so-successful should be given their due recognition for the challenges faced, lessons learnt, and these learnings should be shared across the organization in a transparent and organized manner by ensuring that no fingers are pointed towards individuals who’ve been a part of such projects. This is easier said than done, but is the right thing to do.
Most of us have had projects that haven’t really succeeded. I am no exception. I have definitely learnt a lot more from such projects than the successful ones, and have always applied the learnings proactively on more projects.
Here are a few KISS elements that made sense and have helped me. This is not a universal formula for successful engagements as there often exist different challenges every time. These elements are from my experience and are driven by my belief in emotional value proposition, which is the essence of design thinking.
- Know your customer’s business and project well: Can you stand in front of your customer and debate and discuss the pros and cons of their project convincingly? If yes, the probability of your project succeeding is high. If you are clear, the team will understand the deliverables better, and make the right decisions and suggestions. The Discovery and Envisioning phase of our Ness Connected Framework gives us a great opportunity to be at par with the customer in understanding their project needs and business drivers.
- Be the Customer: We often wander in our world of issues and challenges and look towards the customer for not understanding these. Do a role play on yourself and become the customer for a day and view the engagement and project from the customer’s perspective. The customer may be executing an offshore project for the first time, may be nervous whether we are rightly aligned to his objectives, might not know how much we care about the quality of deliverables….I could list out a dozen such reasons. This paradigm shift (role play) will help you become proactive in presenting and addressing customer expectations. Do this and you will have a happy customer.
- Right engineering practices: Yes, it sounds obvious but believe me, dearth of right engineering practices is often one of the key reasons for projects not succeeding. Set aside time and effort in the planning to straighten out these engineering practices early on. A minimum requirement in my view includes having the following:
- Unit testing framework
- Code review
- Branching and pull requests process
- Automated builds
- Continuous integration
Implement these early on, proactively demonstrate and offer it to the customer for review and comments. Do this and you will have a happy customer.
- Transparency: Know your Sponsor. He is that person at the customer end who is keen to have the program or project(s) succeed. He who believes in a transparent execution culture and is willing to hear that there could be problems at their end, and is thus open to discuss solutions. This does mean you will be transparent about problems and will own them to solution. Build an early informal relation with the sponsor and win his trust. Once this is achieved, the probability of your project engagement and project success is high.
- Team: Remember point #1? You should be the first one to know and understand the customer project well. You can then select the next individual on your team who is keen to know about the project and its relevance and its importance for the customer, and wants to make it a success. Now, you should let that new team member select others in the team. Trust me, this individual will find other competent individuals and this initiative will formulate into a good team. Please note that I don’t mean to say that we need rock stars and definitely not all of them in the team. Just find the one or two other folks who will care for the project as their baby, just as you do. If you can do this, the probability of your project engagement and project success is high.
- Standups: It is all about standups that decide the customer perception and project progress. Mentor and groom the team to understand the bigger picture of the smaller deliverables, so that when they are providing progress updates it resonates to the larger program progress. Drive regular and real time participation of all project stakeholders to the standups. Everyone in the team should understand that these standups are for updates to all the other team members and stakeholders, and NOT progress updates to the management.
- Metrics: A picture is worth a thousand words…so is Data. Genuine data is powerful, speaks for itself and most often it speaks the truth. Metrics should be a platform to view the progress and trends on projects and programs for the organization not limited to a stream only. Proactively, debate and agree on a set of relevant metrics and set reasonable targets for each to monitor for all project engagements. All meetings and ceremonies should review these agreed metrics and conversations, discussions should be data driven and hold less perception. This is again one of those; “easier said than done” acts, but if managed, can increase the probability of success for the project engagement.
- Have fun: Having fun at work is serious business. Do the team lunches, birthdays, children’s day, family day and any other event that will bring the team together. Cherish, thank and celebrate milestones, however small they may be. There is nothing more powerful than a connected team self-driven towards a common goal.
If you finished reading and felt these are stupid and simple things that everyone knows, then, you read it right. It is all about KISS.
