In This Issue:
From the Editor
Geof Lory asks Where Do You Listen From?
Featured Templates:
But the Mystery Is Part of the Excitement!
If You Build It, Will They Come?
If Only I Knew Then What I Know Now
Say When
Pick One From Column A, OR Column B
Start Spreading the News
Those Instructions Are on a Need to Know Basis
Getting from Here to There
ProjectPractitioners Blog
How Green Are You?
Calculating Prioritization Based on ROI
Where's ProjectConnections?
This month: Panama, New York
Next month: San Francisco and Pittsburgh
Corporate Subscriptions
From the Editor
This week we continue our theme of understanding your customers' needs. (Because really, can you ever understand them enough? Well, perhaps... ) But this week, it's more about understanding the particulars of their wants and needs—the requirements, the specifications, and all the little details about communicating with them during and after product launch. Have you thought through the documentation? Does your project manager understand what information is required for marketing? Are you really listening? And do you know when to say when? Plus, a new template from Sinikka Waugh helps us ensure we're all speaking the same language, even in code.
Stay tuned next month for an excerpt from the J. LeRoy Ward's new Dictionary of Project Management Terms and resources to help you tie your projects to your organization's strategic goals (Why does that matter? We'll discuss that, too!)
Featured Article
Where Do You Listen From? by Geof Lory
Learning to listen is simple stuff, but not necessarily easy. Most people see listening as something they do while waiting for their opportunity to talk. It is thought of as the passive part of communication. But great listeners understand that listening is extremely active and requires full engagement—physical, mental, and emotional.
There are plenty of articles and books that address the behavioral skills of listening. Using techniques like active listening, reading body language, and maintaining eye contact are all helpful behaviors to practice and improve your listening abilities. But I would suggest that, in addition to learning the "how", it is important to consider the "where" when developing the discipline of listening. The position or place you emotionally come from when listening will enable and support the behaviors of good listening.
Geof Lory approaches listening as a discipline, and encourages us to treat listening less as a competitive sport and more as a learning activity. Read more »
Featured Templates
NEW – But the Mystery Is Part of the Excitement! – Business Data Dictionary Template – SPECIALThis Premium resource is free to registered Members until April 1, 2009
If there's one thing database managers don't particularly care for, it's mystery—at least when it comes to their code. So many little data elements are buried in specs, requirements, use cases, and sometimes in the system itself. What happens when the same one is used in three different ways? It's a mystery. This template, supplied by ProjectConnections blogger Sinikka Waugh, outlines the form, functions, and level of attention required to maintain a good data dictionary. Not sure you want to bother? Well, just cast your mind back to that unfortunate little integration incident the last time you decided to tie the order system into customer support... Mystery is somewhat overrated.
If You Build It, Will They Come? – Product Requirements Specification – PREMIUM
That depends, of course, on whether you've built what they were looking for. The best products begin with an excellent specification. Even spur of the moment inventions begin with a very specific need in mind. This annotated outline is designed to help your team define what exactly your product will be designed to do—but not necessarily how it will do it. This isn't a design document. Rather, it's a collection of detailed requirements that made the cut after reviewing everything that Marketing and customers were asking for. The resulting document will drive lower-level design work, estimations, planning, and hopefully lines of customers around the block.
If Only I Knew Then What I Know Now – Agile Technique Brief: Requirements Cards – PREMIUM
The trouble with creating detailed requirements when you start a project, of course, is that by the time you get around to developing the feature you've discovered all sorts of things you didn't know when the original requirements were drafted. That's how we end up with all those change requests floating around. For some processes, that tradeoff may be perfectly acceptable. Others may prefer to trade certainty for flexibility. Some agile methodologies use this approach, by creating "user stories" to capture and track feature requirements in brief until it's time to develop them in detail, when all of the information is available to work with. This approach might work well for very small projects that can't easily bear the weight of a lengthy requirements discussion. You may be surprised at the issues dredged up by writing user stories.
I Know It's Not In the Spec, But... – BUNDLE: Software Requirements Capture & Management Dangerous words, but the answer can be even more dangerous, especially. It's not enough to write down the requirements. You also have to manage the project to those requirements. That means requirements that tie to a clear vision/charter, tying vendor requests to the requirements, and, yes, even monitoring the dreaded change requests. This bundle includes over a dozen practical tools you can use to capture project requirements, translate them to specifications and RFPs, and manage spec changes instead of letting them manage you. Free to Premium members (after their free trial period), or available for direct purchase.
Say When – Mini-Case: Breaking Free of the Requirements Morass – MEMBER
It's important to understand everything the customer needs from your project, but it's also important to stop at some point. When all you're doing is creating requirements, without actually creating a product, the inevitable result is a customer who is unhappy, though well understood. That was what worried the sponsor of this IT project, still stuck in analysis paralysis 6 months into their 9-month project. This case outlines how the team adopted some new procedures, broke free of the thrashing, and managed to deliver on the original deadline.
Pick One From Column A, OR Column B – Project Flexibility Matrix – MEMBER
It's not a good idea to confuse those two words—that is, "want" and "need." It's astonishing how often people will tell you that a project, product or feature needs A, B, or C, when in fact, they will happily surrender it all to get what's in Column C. This simple but effective matrix is a great discussion tool to help customers and team members sort out the wants from the true needs. Having established the right priorities with the customer, this matrix can also help the team in making smaller tradeoffs in the process of pulling the project together. You may find you need to shift the matrix around as the project progresses, because priorities can shift as the deadline approaches.
Start Spreading the News – Marketing Plan – SPECIAL
This Premium resource is free to registered Members until April 1, 2009
The whole point of this project was to solve the customers' problems. Now that you're moving down that road, it's time to let them know about it. This plan highlights the activities and areas required for an effective marketing campaign. You can customize it for your new product or service or to market a product or service already in the channel. Reviewing this plan with your functional groups and project team can help point out the areas where development will—or should—feed information to the marketing group, making life easier for everyone.
Those Instructions Are on a Need to Know Basis – User Documentation Plan – GUEST
Ever opened a package only to find 53 parts in 14 baggies and a 2-page pamphlet of badly transliterated instructions with a couple of sketchy and not-entirely-helpful pictures? You don't want your customers to experience that sort of frustration. When identifying customer needs, don't forget what they'll need to know. It goes far beyond the user's manual. Is some assembly required? Is software ever really plug-and-play? Are there possible compatibility issues, minimum requirements, or required disclaimers? What about all the cool accessories, upgrades, and tips your marketing team wants to share? All this and more falls under the umbrella of user documentation. It's better to start planning it sooner than later, because they shouldn't have to be James Bond to find out how to use your product.
Getting from Here to There – Localization Guidelines – PREMIUM
Branching out into new markets is an enticing possibility, but it takes more than a translation package and a couple of plane tickets. Depending on how new and how remote your market is you may need to consider legal ramifications, packaging, even your product name. (We've all heard those stories.) If this is your first time shipping a product outside the U.S./Canadian markets, this guide can help you get a handle on what localization requires from the project team and ways to plan for these activities.
Project Practitioners Blog
Randy Englund explores the "green" business trend in terms of project environments. How green are you? (Don't miss his previous post on green project leadership, either.)
Brandon Carlson has a simple equation for calculating prioritization based on ROI that may surprise you. (Admittedly the numbers are pretty rough...)
Where's ProjectConnections?
Randy Englund is at the PMI Panama Symposium this week to conduct a seminar on "Creating Excellence in/through Project Management" as well as present a paper on "Managing Up the Organization." On April 10, he addresses "Powering Up Your Interaction Quotient" with Bob Lauridsen for the PMI San Francisco Bay Area Chapter. In April Randy teaches "Project Management Negotiation Principles and Techniques" and then conducts the "Project Management Office" course in May at UCSC Extension in Silicon Valley. He travels in April to Atlanta for PMI SeminarsWorld and then to Amsterdam in May to present at the PMI Global Congress.
Carl Pritchard will be in Albany, New York next week, discussing Advanced Risk Management at the local PMI chapter on March 23. March 26-27, he'll be in the Big Apple for a PMP Prep class in the neighborhood of the World Trade Center. April 7-8 he'll be teaching PMP Prep in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Details and registration information are available on Carl's website.
Kent McDonald won't be around and about much until the May 1 Central Iowa IIBA Business Analyst Development Day 2009. But we can't resist a shout out about his new book with Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, and Todd Little, Stand Back and Deliver, which is now available on Amazon for pre-order. With four outstanding contributors like that, how can you go wrong?
Corporate Subscriptions and Licensing
Want your team members to have their own access to templates and how-to resources for their project work? Need to share documents and deliverables beyond your project team? We make it easier with affordable corporate subscriptions and licensing. Detailed information regarding corporate options is available online. Give your whole team, or even the entire organization, cost-effective access to our comprehensive online library of resources. You already know how helpful it's been for you. Now it's time to share with everyone else. Find out more »Not sure if corporate terms apply to you? Check out our licensing terms at the top of our Terms of Service page, in refreshingly ordinary, everyday English.