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Obstacles for the Remote Project Manager

12/29/2021

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The project manager is the project leader, the go-to person on the project, the one everyone is supposed to look to and listen to for direction and status. What about the project customer who can’t reach out and touch the project manager whenever they want to? Do they have concerns? Is their money being well spent? And what about the project manager? What obstacles does the remote PM face that would otherwise not be present if he was sitting at the customer site on a daily basis? 
Let’s examine four key obstacles that can easily become an issue on any remotely managed project. I’m certain there are many more possible obstacles, but these are some of the most common ones that I’ve encountered. 
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Read the full article...
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Do Best Practices = Customer Satisfaction?

12/24/2021

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To give our projects the best chance for success, we as project managers are expected to practice ‘best practices.’ Two questions – actually three questions – come from this. What are best practices? Do best practices result in project success? Do best practices result in satisfied customers?


Let’s look at the first two quickly and then the third one in detail….


What are project management best practices?


In short, best practices to me are performing those tasks that get the job done efficiently, in a timely manner, and - hopefully - successfully. In a PM sense it means producing timely status reports, holding weekly status meetings with your team and customer, communicating effectively and efficiently, revising and distributing the project schedule on a weekly basis, and staying on top of the project budget by reviewing and revising the budget actuals and forecast on a weekly basis. There are probably many more items that could be lumped into PM best practices, but at least following these gets you well on your path toward project success.


Do best practices = project success?


The answer, unfortunately, is no. They certainly can. And following best practices definitely give you your best chance at project success. But there are factors that will arise that are unexpected or outside your control that you can’t get around. Best practices will help you deal with this …. for example mitigating a risk because you’ve been practicing good risk management throughout the engagement and you’re ready to handle the issue due to best practices. But best practices can’t cover everything. You’ll come out ahead more often than not by using best practices, but there’s still no guarantee.


Do best practices = customer satisfaction?


This brings us to the main question. By practicing best practices, are we ensured of achieving customer satisfaction? Again, unfortunately, no. Just like project success, practicing PM best practices will give us a much higher likelihood of achieving customer satisfaction, but there is no guarantee. In fact, you could complete what you and your team – and even your senior management – deems to be a very successful project and still not have a satisfied customer. How? Easy. Let’s say you finish your project on time and on budget. It’s likely your senior management will be very satisfied with that outcome. However, due to poor requirements provided to you at the beginning and a shorter than ideal planning phase, you ended up providing the customer with exactly what they asked for – but not exactly what their end users needed. When the customer realizes that the solution that has been delivered is not a workable solution – doesn’t fully meet their needs – will they be satisfied? Not likely. They may or may not point the finger at you and your team. But they won’t be satisfied.


Customers are a quirky bunch and it’s best that you figure out just how quirky as early in the project as possible. Stay on top of their needs, tend to their concerns, and over communicate project information to them. Keeping them informed and confident in your ability to lead their project is a great way to achieve customer satisfaction. Remember, the customer is part of the team – treat them that way and always communicate both good and bad project information to them as quickly as possible. Bad news doesn’t always make for an unsatisfied customer. But a customer who feels they are in the dark will always be dissatisfied.


I’d appreciate any feedback our readers can provide. What are your best practices? And what’s your take on best practices leading to customer satisfaction? I look forward to your input.To give our projects the best chance for success, we as project managers are expected to practice ‘best practices.’ Two questions – actually three questions – come from this. What are best practices? Do best practices result in project success? Do best practices result in satisfied customers?


Let’s look at the first two quickly and then the third one in detail….


What are project management best practices?


In short, best practices to me are performing those tasks that get the job done efficiently, in a timely manner, and - hopefully - successfully. In a PM sense it means producing timely status reports, holding weekly status meetings with your team and customer, communicating effectively and efficiently, revising and distributing the project schedule on a weekly basis, and staying on top of the project budget by reviewing and revising the budget actuals and forecast on a weekly basis. There are probably many more items that could be lumped into PM best practices, but at least following these gets you well on your path toward project success.


Do best practices = project success?


The answer, unfortunately, is no. They certainly can. And following best practices definitely give you your best chance at project success. But there are factors that will arise that are unexpected or outside your control that you can’t get around. Best practices will help you deal with this …. for example mitigating a risk because you’ve been practicing good risk management throughout the engagement and you’re ready to handle the issue due to best practices. But best practices can’t cover everything. You’ll come out ahead more often than not by using best practices, but there’s still no guarantee.


Do best practices = customer satisfaction?


This brings us to the main question. By practicing best practices, are we ensured of achieving customer satisfaction? Again, unfortunately, no. Just like project success, practicing PM best practices will give us a much higher likelihood of achieving customer satisfaction, but there is no guarantee. In fact, you could complete what you and your team – and even your senior management – deems to be a very successful project and still not have a satisfied customer. How? Easy. Let’s say you finish your project on time and on budget. It’s likely your senior management will be very satisfied with that outcome. However, due to poor requirements provided to you at the beginning and a shorter than ideal planning phase, you ended up providing the customer with exactly what they asked for – but not exactly what their end users needed. When the customer realizes that the solution that has been delivered is not a workable solution – doesn’t fully meet their needs – will they be satisfied? Not likely. They may or may not point the finger at you and your team. But they won’t be satisfied.


Customers are a quirky bunch and it’s best that you figure out just how quirky as early in the project as possible. Stay on top of their needs, tend to their concerns, and over communicate project information to them. Keeping them informed and confident in your ability to lead their project is a great way to achieve customer satisfaction. Remember, the customer is part of the team – treat them that way and always communicate both good and bad project information to them as quickly as possible. Bad news doesn’t always make for an unsatisfied customer. But a customer who feels they are in the dark will always be dissatisfied.


I’d appreciate any feedback our readers can provide. What are your best practices? And what’s your take on best practices leading to customer satisfaction? I look forward to your input.
To give our projects the best chance for success, we as project managers are expected to practice ‘best practices.’ Two questions – actually three questions – come from this. What are best practices? Do best practices result in project success? Do best practices result in satisfied customers?


Let’s look at the first two quickly and then the third one in detail….


What are project management best practices?


In short, best practices to me are performing those tasks that get the job done efficiently, in a timely manner, and - hopefully - successfully. In a PM sense it means producing timely status reports, holding weekly status meetings with your team and customer, communicating effectively and efficiently, revising and distributing the project schedule on a weekly basis, and staying on top of the project budget by reviewing and revising the budget actuals and forecast on a weekly basis. There are probably many more items that could be lumped into PM best practices, but at least following these gets you well on your path toward project success.


Do best practices = project success?


The answer, unfortunately, is no. They certainly can. And following best practices definitely give you your best chance at project success. But there are factors that will arise that are unexpected or outside your control that you can’t get around. Best practices will help you deal with this …. for example mitigating a risk because you’ve been practicing good risk management throughout the engagement and you’re ready to handle the issue due to best practices. But best practices can’t cover everything. You’ll come out ahead more often than not by using best practices, but there’s still no guarantee.


Do best practices = customer satisfaction?


This brings us to the main question. By practicing best practices, are we ensured of achieving customer satisfaction? Again, unfortunately, no. Just like project success, practicing PM best practices will give us a much higher likelihood of achieving customer satisfaction, but there is no guarantee. In fact, you could complete what you and your team – and even your senior management – deems to be a very successful project and still not have a satisfied customer. How? Easy. Let’s say you finish your project on time and on budget. It’s likely your senior management will be very satisfied with that outcome. However, due to poor requirements provided to you at the beginning and a shorter than ideal planning phase, you ended up providing the customer with exactly what they asked for – but not exactly what their end users needed. When the customer realizes that the solution that has been delivered is not a workable solution – doesn’t fully meet their needs – will they be satisfied? Not likely. They may or may not point the finger at you and your team. But they won’t be satisfied.


Customers are a quirky bunch and it’s best that you figure out just how quirky as early in the project as possible. Stay on top of their needs, tend to their concerns, and over communicate project information to them. Keeping them informed and confident in your ability to lead their project is a great way to achieve customer satisfaction. Remember, the customer is part of the team – treat them that way and always communicate both good and bad project information to them as quickly as possible. Bad news doesn’t always make for an unsatisfied customer. But a customer who feels they are in the dark will always be dissatisfied.


I’d appreciate any feedback our readers can provide. What are your best practices? And what’s your take on best practices leading to customer satisfaction? I look forward to your input.
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5 Best Practices for Continuous Testing

12/17/2021

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Quality is critical to customer satisfaction, project success, development and design of an end user solution and something that should be checked, re-checked and reported on in detail in any project delivery initiative. At the very basis of quality delivery is thorough testing prior to delivery. In tech projects, that can be subsystem testing, system testing, user acceptance testing (UAT) and final testing prior to solution delivery or handoff. It can also be in the form of something called continuous testing.


What is continuous testing?


Continuous Testing is defined as a software testing type that involves a process of testing early, testing often, test everywhere, and automated. It is a strategy of evaluating quality at every step of the Continuous Delivery Process.


In Agile, where software is frequently released to production, it is extremely important ensure that software is of high quality throughout the development. Testing needs to happen early and often as development is ongoing, requirements are being added and revised and sprints are happening with functionality being user tested and released to end users. It is critical that organizations ensure that the requirements are right and detailed enough for the design and development, of course, and the best scenario is to test throughout development and not leave testing till just before release.


Below are a set of best practices that we can follow to implement and improve testing throughout the development lifecycle.


Best Practices:
  • Know the business goals and processes
  • Excellent collaboration between developers and testers
  • Choose the best software for your niche
  • Incorporate appropriate quality analysis
  • Make it automatic


Let's examine each of these in more detail...


Know the business goals and processes


Continuous testing means testing early and frequently. We must ensure to acquire requirements from business to start development.
  • Building a close relationship with the business analysts is important for QA
  • Eliminating vagueness from user stories is important- one must ensure user story includes a clear set of acceptance criteria and is testable
  • Ignoring non-functional testing can be risky as it can hamper security and performance
  • Building meaningful and important end-to-end test scenarios by utilizing data/analytics and trends from the production website to collect information about user journeys and activities through the application should be significant
  • Focus on providing value for the business – organize testing in a lean manner. Failure to drive this concept can lead to delays, frustration and costly mis-communication. Same page understanding and excellent communication is critical


Excellent collaboration between developers and testers


Developers test over and over again. Eventually, though, there are system tests and user acceptance test scenarios that happen with dedicated teams assigned to match requirements to the end functionality and proper outputs. Collaboration is key here to ensure requirements are tested properly and acceptable to the end users.


  • Pairing testers with developers is important to ensure effective unit testing is executed
  • Reducing unnecessary testing artifacts like carrying out extensive test cases and test plans, reducing wait times for testing should be kept in mind
  • Adapting a more investigative attitude towards testing while testing manually can be helpful


Choose the best software for your niche


Your organization has it's own unique goals, mission, requirements and end user demands. There are continuous software options out there to explore and finding the right fit can be a challenge. Plan, demo, use trials and assign a team to explore and evaluate the options is the best way to weed out the alternatives and find a solution that scales with your needs and works today.


  • Continuous testing can be extremely helpful in providing and error free solution – especially in the mobile app niche where businesses often weigh-in heavily now and going forward in order to differentiate themselves from the competition.
  • Choosing the best solution that matches business goals and mission and scales with the projects and business initiatives can provide the best long-term success
  • Reporting is key to testing success – choose a continuous testing solution that provides both an informative dashboard for management and top level sponsors as wel as the down and dirty project teams and developers


Incorporate appropriate quality analysis


Whether quality assurance is all hands-on, partial or full automatic, it remains a key aspect of any testing solution. This is especially true of a continuous testing solution as the organization is looking to justify it's transition to and reliance on this potentially productive and efficient answer to delivering the best quality end solution to project customers and end users.


  • Quality analysis and assurance in testing is critical to project success and customer satisfaction
  • Detailed reporting of quality is key to fast compliance and understanding of quality delivery and acceptance
  • Automated quality reporting through the right software is important to keep costs in check and eliminate increased potential for human error or subjective reporting of results – increasing management and customer confidence


Make it automatic


Continuous testing follows the test early and test often approach. Automated testing is useful in order to get quick feedback on the application quality.


  • Making test automation a responsibility of both developers and testers is imperative
  • Knowing when to automate tests and when to leave them as manual is critical for an effective and speedy delivery
  • Running automated tests from a CI server is significant
  • Automating new functionality and stories along development instead of leaving them for later should be the ultimate goal.
  • Forget pilot / sandbox deployments to QA for testing – automate to test environments for best enablement of continuous testing
  • Human involvement in processes should be eliminated as much as possible – automat whatever can be automated
  • Standardize the test environments.
  • Scale automated testing for best and most reliable results.


Summary / call for input


Continuous testing has proved to be a major asset to organizations who are looking to accelerate their software development and release schedules. Especially in mobile app scenarios as mentioned above. It can prove critically helpful fulfilling delivery schedules in time and boost software development process. As mentioned above, appropriate reporting is key in order to enable enterprise wide buy-in, adaptation and understanding.


Readers – what is your take on continuous testing? Is it for your organization? Are you looking for new testing solutions? Have you found yourself struggling with the delivery of quality end tech solutions or struggled through the UAT process repeatedly?
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Take the Proggio Challenge - the World's #1 PPM Tool

12/16/2021

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Take the challenge... Please give top project portfolio management (PPM) solution Proggio a free try and give me a 1-2 paragraph review of your experience.

Effortlessly manage your project portfolio on a collaborative timeline with the ultimate clarity and visibility. Gain control of your project portfolio today.

If you download the trial and test it out I will post your review of the experience here and on my blog for the world to see. Let's expand our horizons for 2022. More challenges to follow!! Go here to sign up and try it out

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Take the GamePlan Challenge

12/16/2021

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Take the challenge... Please Give GamePlan task and project management software a free try and give me a 1-2 paragraph review of your experience. I will post it here and on my blog for the world to see. Let's expand our horizons for 2022. More challenges to follow!! Go here to sign up and try it out

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Try GamePlan for the Best in Project Communication

12/14/2021

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In a business you need to communicate business plans internally with your team, to the board, to investors and to clients.

Everyone understands a plan in GamePlan because it is presented visually on the GamePlan Whiteboard.
​
Understanding the plan promotes buy-in from the team, encourages relevant questions from the board, and gives clients and investors confidence in you.             

Try GamePlan for free.   
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5 Characteristics of the Best Project Leaders

12/14/2021

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Certain qualities across the board make the best leaders in many professions. In order to deliver consistent success in the project management world, our project leaders need to bring specific skills and characteristics to the table. Success on any given project can be luck, but success on a consistent basis on project engagements is far more than just luck – it’s what the project manager consistently brings to each project they are managing.
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What I want to consider here are what characteristics make up the top performing project leaders based on my experience and the opinions of a few other trusted leaders. What sets them apart from less successful PMs?...
Read the full article...
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5 Ways to Be Everything to Your Project Customer

12/14/2021

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You’ve been handed a project for an important customer to your organization. Project managers are necessary – but also sometimes looked at by a project customer as an expensive, necessary (maybe) evil. So be careful – you may be treading on thin waters from the beginning. Figure out your place and how the customer perceives your role. Figure out what they want to see and hear from you each week. Usually, you can get that well defined during a project kickoff session but not always – and things can change along the way depending on how the project is proceeding… good or bad.
​

For me, I’ve found several ways to help the project along in tight situations and increase customer satisfaction...
Read the full article...
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Brad Egeland's MVP Award Winning Article for Liquid Planner: 7 Key Considerations for Building the Perfect PMO

12/13/2021

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Thank you for voting! My article for top PM software LiquidPlanner was a 2021 MVP Award winner. The article is "7 Key Considerations for Building the Perfect PMO." Please check it out and also check out LiquidPlanner's award winning software by requesting a demo or signing up for free. Thanks!
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Brad Egeland Named #1 on the Best Project Management Blogs to Follow in 2022

12/12/2021

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With more than two decades of project management experience and an entire wall of industry awards, Brad Egeland shares his insights on the field as well as actionable tips on how best to solve project-related problems. Reflecting Egeland’s domain authority, the site provides whitepapers, video series, templates, software reviews, webinars, and other resources. ​
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    Brad Egeland


    Named the "#1 Provider of Project Management Content in the World," Brad Egeland has over 25 years of professional IT experience as a developer, manager, project manager, cybersecurity enthusiast, consultant and author.  He has written more than 8,000 expert online articles, eBooks, white papers and video articles for clients worldwide.  If you want Brad to write for your site, contact him. Want your content on this blog and promoted? Contact him. Looking for advice/menoring? Contact him.

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