Last post I made was about the problems with development projects. Exact project progress isn’t known in the beginning of the acceptance testing. In that post I told about how we have solved that problem in our own development projects.

Case Website 2016 -project

Here is a practical example of our development project. We are renewing our website to support inbound-marketing better. Picture below is the project’s schedule. At a first glance it looks like a basic plan, but there are a few things to take into closer inspection.

Right sized projects

Because we have great measuring tools, we know what our business’ problem solving ability is. We keep our development projects sufficiently small. If there is a larger development coming up, we make it into several smaller projects in a row. This is how we get our investments to profit faster.

Dividing the development project into right sized parts

How to eat an elephant: One bite at a time.

We divide the development into bite-sized activities to make real-time progress tracking possible. Planning the work takes a little time, but good planning and real-time tracking speed up the process considerably.

Here is a picture of how doing one web-page is divided into activities.

Do right things at the right time

For the project to be successful, it is important that the resources do right things at the right time. I make sure of this by adding only those activities to their worklists that they have to do next.

Upcoming activities are On hold.

All project activities and other work on one worklist

Every one of us has their own worklist. If it is a ticket, defect, test case, client contact, it’s on that list. No time is wasted on searching things from Excel sheets or logs. Even leading the company is easier, because I can see in one glance what everyone is working on.

How we have built our project model

Clearly executing this project model requires a good collaborative tool. Technically this model is implemented easily. It’s more about the desire and need to develop project activity. And, of course, the know-how.