How to make your Project Manager happy?
I'm acting as Technical Project Manager on two of our company's projects - both offshore projects - and I am beginning to agree with Martin Fowler that the key to offshore development is 3 things: Communication, communication and communication!
However, I realised that even if you agree that your communication needs improving, it's a hard step to get improvements. One of the ways I'm trying to get improvements in my team is to implement some of Scott Berkun's strategies in The Art of Project Management. One of the one's I found particularly useful is the following exercise that I've adapted from Scott Berkun called The Communication Ladder.
In our company, a large portion of our communication to our offshore partners and their clients is via email. Even if we do have a video conference, Skype, telephone call or MSN chat, we will typically follow this up with an email. As a result, the Sent folder of my mailbox is a fairly accurate record of the communication I have been having.
So here's how the Communication Ladder works:
At the end of each day, you run through all the mails in your Sent email box, and rate them from 1 to 5 according to the following scale:
1 - Transmitted: I'm sure that the message was transmitted. As long as you have faith in your email system, pretty much all your mails should get at least this score.
2 - Received: If you are sure that your message was actually received, give it a 2. Typically, if you are using Read Receipts on your important messages, or following them up with MSN chat, you can get a 2 fairly easily.
3 - Understood: Here's where it starts getting a bit subjective - give your message a 3 if you know it was understood. If you keep getting replies for clarification, that's a clue that understanding is not happening.
4 - Agreement: Even if your message is understood, there's no guarantee that the reader actually agrees with you. So look for evidence that the reader agrees with you. Silence is usually not agreement.
5 - Useful Action: Even if you reach agreement, that is still not enough for most business communication. Pretty much the point of most communication is to get some kind of useful action to result. It doesn't really matter how much a group of developers agree that a particular website's use of Viewstate is a bit heavy, and that is the cause of performance problems, the only way those performance problems are going to go away is if someone does something about it (and might need some other useful actions to happen first like budget approval, creating the time to do it, etc).
Once you've rated your mails, any mail that does not score a 5 should become an action item for your next day. And if a particular issue sits on a score for any length of time, it's probably best to ratchet up the communication a notch on them. There are really two ways to do that:
1. Change the medium to a more interactive one: If you only communicate via email, switch to phone or MSN. If you still getting stuck on MSN or phone, meet in person.
2. Manage it up: If attempts at changing the medium fail, the next step is to manage it up. If you are a developer, start involving a senior developer or your project manager. If the issue is a problem on the receiver side, try and get some more people on that side informed.
All of this probably sounds obvious (and in fact most of project management is), but I find that making something like the Communication Ladder a daily discipline actually helps improve things a lot. Too often, they way we approach communication in software development is too ad hoc, and having a regular thing to do to improve matters is a great way to start.
For fun, I've actually published my sent item box for Friday (click the pic for an enlargement) and in red scored the items with a brief note on why the items are what they are (I had to protect the names and project names of course!). I don't actually make notes like this to such detail (and definitely not in Paint!), but usually just make an action list. For example, Monday's action list will look something like:
- Phone client tech support to get another time to sort out connectivity to their CMS database.
- Check how the process for the VISA for the two developers going to Tilburg is going.
- Have a meeting on the next steps for the SFTP roll-out.
- Get someone to install FXCop on a particular project.
