Build in Asia
Design/Review in Europe
Test in South-America
Every day.
Every 24hrs.

Well, I am starting to believe that this is a great way to speed up the process but a small devil in me asks this stupid question:

What if at some point you need to talk with the people from the previous time zone?

Suppose you found something that you don’t understand in their specification or in their code, or it seems to be wrong. You want to discuss the issue with your offshore colleagues but their working day is over and they went home. Now you have to wait until tomorrow.

I think that the time difference is a huge problem in communication and although following the sun seems to be a good idea it is not a panacea and you have to develop a strong process to ensure communication abilities without disturbing the personal life of your staff.

There is one more great article Bas wrote on offshore software development that I highly recommend: 25 Rock Solid Tips to Supervise Offshore Development. Read it and follow those tips - they are really helpful.

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email.

You may also find these posts interesting:

• The Most Important Rules of Delegation
• What is the project goal?
• Software Product Success Stories
• Who Does Money Really Motivate?
• Follow The Sun - Tips For Offshore Development

I notice when I talk about Business Analysis people often have a very fuzzy idea of what I’m talking about. And the deeper I go into defining the profession from a general perspective, the fuzzier it gets.

That’s why I decided to write down the things I personally do on a day-to-day basis, and I hope this will help build a better picture for the uninitiated. Other BAs might do different things, but usually there a level of similarity, otherwise there would not be a name for the profession.

1. Documentation – Most known and usually most tedious BA activity. The problem I’m trying to avoid with this is to have 5 team members and 3 major stakeholders and amongst them 15 different ideas what we are actually doing. The Business Requirements Specification is a tool for avoiding this, but not the only one and often falls short of achieving the objective.

2. Process Analysis – I don’t do enterprise analysis, at least not on my current position. What I do is more focused – when we change the systems people will change their work process. What I’m trying to describe is how things are done now (the AS-IS point of view) and how the work will be done after the change (the TO-BE process). The purpose here is to demonstrate to the team what the changes we are making will actually achieve. It also visualizes in front of stakeholders in detail what business result they have requested.

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• The role of the Business Analyst - poll results

First point of the author is that top-down planning is old style. He says:

Top-down planning makes the assumption that upper management has the best processes and ideas to run a project smoothly.

I think the author confuses planning with management. Top-down planning means dividing the project’s work into several big parts, then each parts is divided into smaller parts and so on until we reach small enough tasks that we can estimate and assign to somebody. Nobody said that it has to be done by the upper management although I believe that the first steps in dividing the work should be made by the project manager not because she has the best ideas but because she has the best view of “the big picture”.

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• Project Management and Hiking
• The Recommended Weekly Readings (2007-08-18). Project Management
• Project Management 3.0
• The Project Management Theories According to Bas de Baar
• Software Project Management Again

It is intersting to notice that giants like IBM and HP are always “subscribed” to charts like this while Microsoft, for example, is missing. What impresses me most is that a great part of the companies Jim Collins analyzes in his books Built to Last and Good to Great are present in this list. This means to me that he really found the right ingredients for creating a great company and I strongly recommend you these books.

Take a look at this chart and I will be glad if you share your comments about the companies enlisted.

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email.

You may also find these posts interesting:

• The Most Important Rules of Delegation
• What is the project goal?
• Software Product Success Stories
• Who Does Money Really Motivate?
• Follow The Sun - Tips For Offshore Development

You can buy a person’s hands, but you can’t buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is.

- Stephen Covey

Of course, it is the most difficult thing to do - to win someone’s heart - but I believe that it is the best way to win their loyalty and devotion.

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email.

You may also find these posts interesting:

• The Most Important Rules of Delegation
• What is the project goal?
• Software Product Success Stories
• Who Does Money Really Motivate?
• Follow The Sun - Tips For Offshore Development

Many people explain that the answer to the question “Why do we do this project?” is called a project’s goal and it is very important for the project manager to stick to it and never deviate. While I agree completely that everything we do in our professional life should be done for a reason and in project management it means that we should know why we are doing that project and never forget it, I disagree with the term “project goal” because it is misleading.

There is no project goal because only living creatures have goals. A stone doesn’t have a goal so doesn’t a project. There are two parties involved in a project usually - the customer and the implementor (the project team). They have goals and their interest is written down in some form of contract.

The customer’s goal is usually a business goal - to solve some business problem, to increase the income, to decrease the expenses, to maximize profit, or to improve the company image. They believe that this goal can be achieved by creating the product or the service as a result of that project. Many people say that the project goal is the customer’s goal. But there are some questions here:

1. What if the customer assumes wrongly that the project will achieve their goal? What if you know that what the customer requests are plain stupid? (In the case of software it is usually because they give direct instructions how the product should look like without having any idea how a to develop software) What should you do if you know that in the end they are going to realize that they have spent their money for nothing?
2. What is the implementor’s goal? Is it the same as the customer’s? Isn’t it just to take the customer’s money? At least that is what we do - make software for money. Why should we care about the customer’s goals?

What do you think? I am going to share my opinion on these questions too in the future posts.

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email

You may also find these posts interesting:

• The Most Important Rules of Delegation
• What is the project goal?
• Software Product Success Stories
• Who Does Money Really Motivate?
• Follow The Sun - Tips For Offshore Development

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email

You may also find these posts interesting:

• How To Motivate Your Team?
• Who Does Money Really Motivate?

Let you team members be creative!

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There are many occasions when a project manager is tempted to take on some development tasks especially if she is an experienced developer or when the project management activities don’t require full-time commitment. Things go worse when a technical issue arises and apparently there is no team member who can solve it. The project manager’s heart cannot restrain from plunging straight into the problem; she buries herself into that technical challenge and after that nothing can draw her attention back until a solution has been found.

This a very dangerous temptation and many former developers give in to it. The problem is that while you think about that specific technical problem you forget about all the other obligations you have as a project manager. As the old proverb says, you cannot see the forest from the trees. But your new position requires that you never lose sight of the forest.

(more…)

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More interesting to me were some techniques which I find very efficient but seemingly more rarely used. So I decided to take a closer look on them and to analyze them in more details.

• Following people around (Observation). It happens very often a customer to come to us with their vision about how the new product should look like and what it should do without being able to explain what exactly is the business process running in their company or how it is going to change with the deployment of the new software solution. One of the most effective approaches to study the customer’s business process and the habits and the technical skills of the future end users is just to stay there and observe their daily activities. Observation gives us the ability to see some flaws in their work, some too complex or unnecessary activities that could be eliminated or to get some ideas to improve the process and thus to increase the customer’s profit from implementing the new software solution. It is much better if our business analysts have the ability to the actual work the users do to get a hands-on feel for the real situation.
  Unfortunately, we are often pressed by tight deadlines especially in the analysis phase (which is a big mistake!) and we rarely use this technique for gathering information.
  Sometimes, the customer doesn’t allow us to meet their employees using security arguments. In those cases we should strongly emphasize that this is a risk for the right understanding of the requirements and for the successful release of the project.

(more…)

You may also find these posts interesting:

• The Most Important Rules of Delegation
• What is the project goal?
• Software Product Success Stories
• Who Does Money Really Motivate?
• Follow The Sun - Tips For Offshore Development