Getting over Bottlenecks: Perspectives & Priorities

When was the last time you got stuck at work/project, because it’s dependent on others’ part? That’s a bottleneck & it happens to many of us on a daily, if not hourly basis. It even get more frustrating when you find out no work has been done it while you are waiting so you can complete your part.

In IT projects many task rely on each other but I do find that some tasks get dropped until it’s too late & impact the project. To make sure important tasks doesn’t get stuck at a bottleneck, you will need to convince other the importance of the task in their perspective.

Everyone & each role has their own priorities. In order to get someone’s attention, you got to know what’s important to them.

Here are some role specific priorities:

  • Project Manager: On-Time
  • Developer: Making it work as per spec
  • Business/System Analyst: Make sure things doesn’t break
  • Database Admin: System performance & data integrity
  • IT/Project Coordinator: Clear Communication/minimize confusion

(Of course, these are not their only concerns; but it’s important to their role)

In the last post, I mention why project manager will concern about time > money in most scenarios. To get the project manager’s attention, you can focus on how your bottleneck would impact the project time, rather than just requesting to get it done.


Why would we need to do this, isn’t this part of their job?

Nowadays, most of us has a million things to do; as the day goes on, your request can get delay because:
- We/They don’t have enough time
- Other priority overrides
- We/They are juggling too many balls
… or any other reasons
In short, sometimes tasks does get dropped … that’s the reality. That’s why you sometimes need to explain from their point of view, so they will give it priority.

Like requesting for anything, the approach is as important as the ask; It will end up with a difference in results.

The Vital Pillar of Project Management

Anyone learn a bit about project management knows the three PM pillars/constraints are Scope, cost & time. All 3 needs focus to have any kind of project success, but there are priorities.

What is a PM’s most concerning constraint between Scope, Cost & Time?
     Most people will say $$$
That’s what I thought too … until I took my strategic project management class.
     In fact the key constraint is TIME.



Which would you choice?:

An experience developer that takes 5 weeks for $15000
vs
An decent developer that that takes 8 weeks for $10000

Rationally, it might seem the latter would be the right choice (the other cost 50% more).
But if you consider the project becomes delayed for 2-3 weeks, It will cost for the project way more when you have to pay everyone for 2-3 more weeks. That’s why, a week or 2 of delays in time could push the budget overboard.

Time isn’t just about time, it directly affects cost too.
   So in most cases, a project manager should prioritize “on Time” > “on Budget”.

Follow-up: Making Sure it’s Done

Follow-up is a basic work skill not everyone has or will learn. When you work in IT for any mid-large company, you are guarantee to work with several layers between the developer and the business users. At this point, getting a task done get troublesome.

Example: Such as getting a developer access to the server.

The task takes at most 5 minutes, the approval & the process takes a dozen days … or forever. It’s not that we need it this second, but such request taking 2 weeks is unacceptable. Although the task/request might of been dropped somewhere within the business process. To make sure things like this doesn’t happen, you got to follow-up.


My Follow-up Tactics:
Sometimes you can’t assume things would just get done, so you got to follow-up.
At first you can give the benefit of the doubt, request gets done.

To make sure requests/tasks gets done, here are my step to follow-up:
1st Follow-up: The request can be left hanging around. This is to make sure the request is initiated.

2nd Follow-up: It’s on someone’s list, but priority is lower. Making sure the request has an estimate completion time, at this point you should give them time to work on the request (amongst other priority)

3rd Follow-up: It on someone’s list, but priority changes & the task get forgotten
At about 50-75% time has gone, double check if the completion is delayed or not.
The purpose of this is to make sure the request is in progress & not dropped due other requests; if it’s dropped, it will them give enough time to complete the task with minimal delay.

4th Follow-up: It needs more time, but no one was notified … this is the point where the project schedule gets delay.At this point, you are annoying the person … so you got to be tactful.


The 1st & 2nd follow-up is need for most cases, in order to make sure the task is clarify with a specified end-time.

I usually won’t use the full tactics if it’s someone I had never worked with before; This method is used only if the colleague is unmotivated or they have too many different priorities … That’s why you follow-up with them & let them set an their end-date.

Soft Side of IT is Coming Back

The return to Soft Side of IT!

From working on more projects, these posts will be about my experience and thoughts working in It & with technology.

Especially on a ERP systems implementation project in 2010 that I am in. With 15 month of being in this project, there are tons that I have seen. So I want to document some of my lesson learned; that’s why I have decided to start posting this blog again.

For now, I am going to posting once every 2 weeks.

I hope you learn as much as I will from this experience.
Enjoy,
Ian


Side Note:
For people who wondered what I was up to on my hiatus … in the last 6 month, I have posting at Teach … Lead … Careering. The site was to apply teaching skills to the business world.

Go ahead & check it out.

Having a Successful System Requires more than Tech

I caught a show called ‘Family Restaurant’ at 5am yesterdays, it was just one of those day that you can’t fall back to sleep.  It was showcasing the son of a chinese family restaurant trying to change handwritten ordering system with an computer solution.

The dad didn’t want this change, while the son was ecstatic while computer arrived.  The son setup up the touchscreen system so that it is initiative (beef dishes was colored with brown, rice was white …).  When he tries to train his dad & mom to use the system; the mom picked it up pretty quickly, but the dad just couldn’t use the system & excused himself by saying be can’t use computers.

It just seems so familiar… It can be the easiest & most intuitive system to use, but if the user is not interest in change, there is nothing the system can have that can persuade user to use or learn it.  

This just reminds me if the an implementation fails, it might not be the technology or design, it just might be user or business preferring the original processes or systems.

The next president, Obama’s views on information & technology in 2007

In celebration of Barack Obama winning the US Presidency, here is a great talk with Barack Obama

This was the first Obama appearance I saw & it blew me away.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwo

This talk was at Google in 2007, where he talked about:
- Committing Science & Innovation
- Open internet & net neutrality
- Google for government
- Why he was running for 2008 presidency
- Restoring US status in the world

Even after going through all the craziness for a year, what he said in this talk is pretty close to his campaign by the end. This really shows how much integrity he has to his word.

Go watch this video, it’s definitely worth knowing what potential future is to come for the internet & other technologies.

Pogue: Simplicity Sells & Soft Issues of Tech

Here is a insight talk from David Pogue:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_pogue_says_simplicity_sells.html


Why the soft side matters?
David Pogue describes the issues pretty well with talk at the TED conference. It’s funny & a few 2 minute techie show tunes.

In systems I have used, there is usually a plethora of functionalities; but most of the them takes forever to find & several tries to make it work.

David takes this issue on the user side & describes day to day frustrations of everyone.

Adding function vs making it simpler to use

Your solution can be the best in the world, but if your design is not good, no one will use it. Easy is hard, and the hardest part is not deciding what to add, but what to leave out.

So What? … because Simplicity Sells.

Soft Side of IT is part of ITtoolbox


My last post mentioned having a ITtoolbox blog & this is the URL:
  http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/soft-side-of-it

My future postings from this site will also be on IT Toolbox.
With this new affiliation, let’s update the purpose of this blog.


This blog is to discuss the soft side of Information Technology & making IT folks more relatable. As a person who worked in numerous roles between business & IT, we often see issues that come out of nowhere; then in hindsight, it seems so obvious (most of the time).

Soft side of IT can include:
• Soft skills
• IT uses
• Communication & Interactions
• Blindspots
• Personalities & Traits
• Meetings & Project
• Life
• …
Basically, anything besides the ‘code’.

With the interactions between project managers, administrators, developers, IT analysts & Business users (Finance, Billing, Marketing, Customer Service, Procurement, Inventory, Operations …), there are bound to be some misunderstandings somewhere, somehow … then those IT projects are delayed.

Let’s hope we shine a spotlight on some of those area & drive some discussions.

Procrastination, We All Do It

Procrastination is pretty universal & this also affects developers. I remember when I was programming in university; I would try to solve the entire problems/assignments in my head before I start typing a line of code.

This is a way of planning a solution for programmer. Although this only works until it reaches a certain limit … then it cross the line of procrastination.

I just got the go ahead last week from ITToolBox for the soft side of IT blog. I was excited at first, I started dreaming of what to post on the first post. Now I realized that I have been procrastinated on posting on this for over a week. The first 2 day, it was probably planning, but after that it slowly became procrastination. To stop this, I started to write random points to get pass being stuck.

Planning is fine, because it does save time when you can find some efficient way to doing the work; but when you think way too much, planning becomes procrastination.

When you are unsure about a solution, do you start drafting the document or coding a prototype? I will give this a try as well.

Can We Move the Logo a bit higher?

“Can we move the logo a bit higher?”

All developer & web designer probably hear something similar to this before. After days/weeks/months of work to make the system work, rather than commenting on the hard work or the brilliant way to solution a request, the user first comment was on the trivial part.
It drives developers crazy!

This is the equivalent to you prepared & cooked the whole thanksgiving dinner from scratch, and then some at the table says “the turkey is a little bit dry”.

For developers:
Remember the interface is first thing the business user sees, so view it as the warm up to the discussion.

For business analysts & business users:
When you start off with simple changes, just say “Let’s start off with the easy stuff”.

———————-
Here is a related video on product changes called: The Process
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVb8EC1Y2xM

Meetings: Must be Actionable

A good meeting must lead to one objective: Actionable

My last post showed how wasteful it can be. On the other hand, I had been & hosted meetings that ended in 20-30 min with an action plan to implement by the decisions made.

There is recent one to solve an ongoing bug in the system. The goal was to close the issue with an permanent IT solution, even though we ended up with an implement-able action plan that requires minimal human/manual work required.

Original Intent
The original intent of meetings is gets to gather to solve a problem. Although many this we forget to state the purpose of the meeting, then it get side tracked, then 1/2 of the people in the meeting wasted their time.

At the Meetings
As the host, I :
1. Give a brief of what people are coming in for (Otherwise you might use up half the time with misunderstandings)
2. List out the issue & figure out best approach that fit all parties/departments (Followed agenda)
3. List out action to take

4. Follow-up to close open items

Of course, the follow-up of actionable is to take action.

Meetings: Please Make It Better

I don’t know about you, I have been in more than my share of meetings that was a waste of time. My most useless one happened a couple years back; It was a meeting with 30+ developer & a project manager that got side-track for 40 minutes figuring out the 3 colors of the header for the main menu, which involved a discussion 2 1/2 people & decided to talk about it later. How crazy is that?

After that, I decided I will try not to waste other people’s time in meetings by:

1. Only invite the personnels that can contribute & call the people that you might need expertise (Let them know ahead of time)

2. Prepare for the meeting & sending purpose & agenda.

3. Follow the agenda & prevent sidetracking
- Check the time & revise
- Ask about the necessity of the particular discussion

4. Summarize of the meeting
- Quick header for discussed topics
- Decision & Change
- Action log

This can be useful for any detail/solution focused meetings.
Next time I will discuss the good part of meetings.