Archive for October, 2007

Web site layout - 16.2 Recovery Plan Set up a schedule linked

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

16.2 Recovery Plan Set up a schedule linked to milestone completion. Plan completion dates for each mini milestone. Don’t plan on massive overtime: that hasn’t -worked so far, and it won’t work going forward. If you plan massive overtime into your schedule, developers can’t catch up by working more overtime when they get behind. Set the schedule so that if developers get behind on their miniature milestones, they can catch up by working overtime the same day. That allows them to stay on schedule on a day-by-day basis. If you stay on schedule day by day, you stay on schedule week by week and month by month, and that’s the only way it’s possible to stay on schedule for a whole project. Track schedule progress meticulously. If you don’t track progress after you set up the mini milestones, the schedule-creation process will have been just an exercise in wasting time. Check with developers daily to assess their progress against the mini milestones. Be sure that when a milestone is marked “done” it is truly, 100 percent done. Ask the developer, “If I take the source code for this module that’s ‘done’ and lock it in a vault for the rest of the project, can we ship it? Do you still have some tweaking or polishing to do, or is it 100 percent done?” If the developer says, “It’s 99 percent done,” then it’s not done, and the milestone has not been met. Do not allow developers to get off track on their mini-milestone schedules. The easiest way to get off track is to miss one milestone and then to stop keeping track. A 1-day slip turns into a 2-day slip, which turns into 3 clays, and then into a week or more. Soon there is no correspondence between the developer’s work and the milestone schedule. Once a schedule has been calibrated, do not take schedule slips lightly. If a single developer falls behind on a single milestone, expect him or her to work overtime that day to catch up. (If a developer meets a single milestone early, it’s OK to allow him or her to go home early that day.) Daily milestones must be met consistently or the schedule must be recalibrated so that they can be met consistently. Record the reasons for missed milestones. Having a record of the reasons that each milestone was missed can help to detect the underlying causes. A record might point to an individual developer’s need for training or highlight organizational dynamics that make it hard for any developers to make good on their estimates. It can help to distinguish between estimate-related problems and other schedule-related problems. Recalibrate after a short time one or two weeks. If a developer consistently misses milestones and falls more than l/2 day behind, it’s time to recalibrate that developer’s schedule. Recalibrate by increasing the current schedule by the percentage of the slip so far. If the developer has needed 7 days to do 4 days’ work, multiply the rest ofthe work by7A. Don’t play games bythinking that you’ll make up the lost time later. If you’re in project-recovery mode, that game has already been lost.
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Chapter 16: Project Recovery Is (Web hosting billing) a problem

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

Chapter 16: Project Recovery Is a problem developer dragging the rest of the group down? Is team morale high enough to finish the project? Do you have accountability leaks? People or groups who might mean well but who have not been accountable for the results of their work? Fix the parts of your development processes that are obviously broken. When a project is in trouble, everyone usually knows that a few parts of the process are broken. This is where back-to-basics really comes into play the broken parts are often broken because the project has consciously or unconsciously been ignoring the software fundamentals. If the team is tripping over itself because you haven’t set up version control, set up version control. If you’re losing track of the defects being reported, set up a defect tracking system. If end-users or the customer have been adding changes uncontrollably, set up a change-control board. If the team hasn’t been able to concentrate because of a steady stream of interruptions, move them off-site, have the facilities group physically wall-off their area, or put up your own floor-to-ceiling boundary with empty computer boxes. If people haven’t been getting the timely decisions they need, set up a war room: meet at 5:00 p.m. every day and promise that anybody who needs a decision will get one. CROSS-REFERENCE Create detailed miniature milestones. In rescuing a drowning project, it is For details, see Chapter 27, absolutely essential that you set up a tracking mechanism that allows you to “Miniature Milestones,” monitor progress accurately. This is your key to controlling the rest of the project. If the project is in trouble, you have all the justification you need to set up miniature milestones. Miniature milestones allow you to know on a day-by-day basis whether your project is on schedule. The milestones should be miniature, binary, and exhaustive. They’re miniature because each of them can be completed in one or two days, no longer. They’re binary because either they’re done or they’re not they’re not “90 percent done.” They’re exhaustive because when you check off the last milestone, you’re done with the project. If you have tasks that aren’t on the milestone schedule, add them to the schedule. No work is done “off schedule.” Setting and meeting even trivial milestones provides a boost to morale. It shows that you can make progress and that there’s a possibility of regaining control. One of the biggest problems with setting up mini milestones at the beginning of a project is that you don’t know enough to identify all the work in detail. In project-recovery mode, the situation is different. At that late stage in the project, developers have learned enough about the product to be able to say in detail what needs to be-done. Thus mini milestones are particularly appropriate for use in project recovery;
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CROSS-REFERENCE Allowing different levels of commitment is different (Crystaltech web hosting)

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

CROSS-REFERENCE Allowing different levels of commitment is different at the beginning of a project. For details, see Chapter 34, “Signing Up.” CROSS-REFERENCE For more on seeing that developers pace themselves, see Section 43.1, “Using Voluntary Overtime.” CROSS-REFERENCE For a list of many more classic mistakes, see Section 3.3, “Classic Mistakes Enumerated.” 16.2 Recovery Plan If you must hire additional people, consider not hiring developers. Hire administrative people -who can take care of clerical work and help your developers minimize personal downtime (for example, laundry, shopping, bill paying, yard work, and so on). Allowteam membersto bedifferent. Some people will rise to the challenge of project recovery and become heroes. Others will be too burned out and will refuse to give their all. That’s fine. Some people want to be heroes, and other people don’t. In the late stages of a project, you have room for quiet, steady contributors who don’t rise to heroic heights but who know their way around the product. What you don’t have room for are loud naysayers who chide their heroic teammates for being heroic. Morale during project recovery is fragile, and you can’t tolerate people who bring the rest of the team down. See that developers pace themselves. Runners run at different speeds depending on the distance to the finish line. Runners run faster toward a nearby finish line than they do toward a finish line that’s miles away. The best runners learn to pace themselves. Allow your team to break the vicious circle of schedule pressure leading to stress leading to more defects leading to more work leading back to more schedule pressure. Ease the schedule pressure, give the developers time to focus on quality, and the schedule will follow. Process Although you’ll find your greatest leverage in the area of people, you must also clean up your process if you want to rescue a project that’s in trouble. Identify and fix classic mistakes. Survey your project to see whether you’re falling victim to any of the classic mistakes. Here are the most important questions to ask: Is the product definition still changing? Is your project suffering from an inadequate design? Are there too few management controls in place to accurately track the project’s status? Have you shortchanged quality in the rush to meet your deadline? Do you have a realistic deadline? (If you’ve slipped your schedule two or more times already, you probably don’t.) Have people been working so hard that you risk losing them at the end of the project or earlier? (If you’ve already lost people, they’re ‘working too hard.) Have you lost time by using new, unproved technology?
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Chapter 16: Project Recovery options that are more

Monday, October 29th, 2007

Chapter 16: Project Recovery options that are more subtle and often more effective than “you’re fired!” are available. Change the manager’s boss. Sometimes a manager needs different leadership. Move the manager into a participatory role. Sometimes a technically- oriented manager can make a technical contribution that will help the project succeed more than his or her leadership contribution can. Provide the manager with an assistant. Depending on what’s needed, the assistant either can focus on technical details, freeing up the manager to concentrate on big-picture issues, or can handle administrative issues, freeing up the manager to focus on technical matters. In the extreme case, sometimes, the “assistant” can take over nearly all of the manager’s responsibilities, leaving the manager in place to handle administrative duties and reports to upper management. These points focus on management changes, but they apply just as well to changes in the project’s technical leadership. Add peoplecarefully, ifatall. Remember Brooks’s law that adding people to a late project is like pouring gasoline on a fire (Brooks 1975). Don’t add people to a late project willy-nilly. But remember the whole law. If you can partition your project’s work in such a way that an additional person can contribute without interacting with the other people on the project, it’s OK to add a person. Think about whether it makes sense to add someone who will spend 8 hours doing what an existing developer could do in 1 hour. If your project is that desperate, go ahead and add someone. But stick to the plan. Some people can’t abide watching another person spend 8 hours on a 1-hour job regardless of their original intentions. Know what kind of person you are. If you think you might err, err on the side of not adding anyone. Focus people’s time. When you’re in project-recovery mode, you need to make the best possible use of the people who are already familiar with the project. Consider taking the money you would have spent adding people and use it instead to focus the efforts of your existing people. You’ll come out ahead. You can focus existing people in a variety of ways. Give them private offices. Move them off-site. Be sure that they are not distracted by other projects within your organization, so relieve them of tech-support duty, maintenance of other systems, proposal work, and all of the other responsibilities that eat into a developer’s time. The point is not to hold their noses to the grindstone, but to relieve them of all nonessential tasks.
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16.2 Recovery Plan CROSS-REFERENCE For (Web site hosting) details on motivation,

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

16.2 Recovery Plan CROSS-REFERENCE For details on motivation, see Chapter 11, “Motivation.” FURTHER READING For more on the team dynamics of sacrificing sacred cows, see rule #48 in Software Project Dynamics (McCarthy 1995). CROSS-REFERENCE For details on factors that hurt morale, see Section 11.4, “Morale Killers.’ CROSS-REFERENCE For details, see “Problem personnel” in Section 12.4. Do whatever is needed to restore the group’s morale. During project recovery, morale plays a critical role in your team’s productivity. Upper managers will want to know how to motivate your group more. This is a false question during project recovery. If your group has been working hard, the question is not how to motivate them to the utmost, but how to restore their morale so that they will be motivated at all. One of the best ways to restore morale is to take a symbolic action that shows you’re behind the developers, and one of the best ways to do that is to sacrifice one of your organization’s sacred cows. That shows the developers that the company is behind them and illustrates the importance of the project. Your actions say, “We are committed to releasing this product, and we will do whatever it takes to make that happen.” Sacred cows vary among different organizations, but as long as you’re breaking precedent, the developers will get the message. Let them come to work later than the rest of the organization. Let them go home early. Suspend the dress code. Move them off- site. Buy them the new large-screen monitors they’ve wanted. Bring in catered meals. In short, make them feel important. To your project, they are. One of the most sacred of sacred cows to a project that’s behind schedule is the disallowance of time off. If you’ve been in 3-weeks-until-productrelease mode for several months, not only will time off be appreciated by the developers, it will be necessary to keep your team healthy and productive. A whole weekend off can seem like a lifetime to a developer who has been working with no end in sight. Be sure that you’re providing for the team’s hygiene factors. Remove excessive schedule pressure, poor working conditions, management manipulation, and other morale killers. Clean up major personnel problems. The most common complaint about team leaders is that they don’t address problems caused by troublesome team members. If you think you have a problem person, face up to that fact and eliminate the problem. Replace uncooperative team members even if they’re key contributors. They cost more in team morale than they contribute technically. You’re regrouping anyway, so this is a good time to cut your losses. Clean up major leadership problems. The leader who has brought the project to the brink of disaster might not have enough credibility left to make the changes needed to lead the project to success. In some cases, the ineffective leader is the technical lead; in other cases, it’s the project manager. If you’re in a position to do so, consider shaking up the project leadership. Replacing the leader is one option, but if you’re the technical lead, you probably can’t fire an ineffective manager. If you’re the manager, firing a technical lead isn’t always the best course of action anyway. Fortunately, several
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Free web hosting music - Chapter 16: Project Recovery CROSS-REFERENCE For details on

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

Chapter 16: Project Recovery CROSS-REFERENCE For details on identifying development priorities, see “Invent Options for Mutual Gain” in Section 9,2. CROSS-REFERENCE For details, see Chapter 10, “Customer-Oriented Development,” and Chapter 37, “Theory-W Management.” First Steps Before you launch a recovery plan, find out what kind of plan you need. Assess your situation. Determine how critical the deadline really is and what precisely is needed to meet it. You might find out that there isn’t really any hard deadline, and you don’t need to worry about project recovery at all. Or you might find that your customers are much more willing to negotiate the feature set to avoid a late project than they were at the beginning. Apply Theory-W analysis. What do you and your team need to succeed? What do your customers need? What do you need to do to salvage the customer relationship? Don’t focus on the past. Focus on the present. If you can’t find a way to make winners out of everyone by their own standards, scuttle the project. Prepare yourself to fix the project. If your project is in recovery mode and not merely a little behind, your project is broken. Realize that your project is broken. Realize that you can’t fix it by doing the same things you’ve been doing. Mentally prepare yourself to make significant changes. Prepare both your team and your management for the reality that significant changes will be needed if they want to rescue the project. If people aren’t willing to make significant changes, you’ve already lost the battle. Consider canceling the project. Ask your team what needs to be done. Ask everyone on your team to contribute at least five practical ideas about how to, rescue the project. Evaluate the ideas, then implement as many of them as you can. Be realistic. If you’re in project-recovery mode, you’re probably wearing a string of broken schedule promises around your neck. They drag you down as much as the albatross around the neck of the Ancient Mariner dragged him down. If you’re in recovery mode, your team desperately needs a strong dose of clear-headed, realistic project leadership. When you start your project recovery, admit that you don’t know how long it will take to finish. Explain your plan for getting the project back on track, and then give a date by which you can commit to a new deadline. Don’t commit to a new deadline until you have good reasons to think you can meet it. People People are the most important point of leverage in rapid development, and you need to put that room of your rapid-development house in order before you proceed to the areas of process and product.
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16.2 Recovery Plan “I’m really glad we found (Web hosting e commerce)

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

16.2 Recovery Plan “I’m really glad we found this island. Our situation seemed out of control for a while.” Figure 16-1. A weak attempt to regain control of a project cart lead to a false sense of security 16.2 Recovery Plan A set of guidelines exists that can work to rescue floundering projects; the guidelines operate along the lines of people, process, and product. You can combine the practices in this book in endless ways to create an endless number of recovery plans. This section contains one such plan. The plan in this chapter is designed to rescue projects that are in deep trouble. Those are the projects that need the most help, so I have described a thorough approach. If your project is not in that much trouble, you can use a less thorough approach. Adapt this project-recovery plan to the specific needs of your project. CROSS-HEFERENCE One plan that virtually never works is cutting corners. Far from being a time For more on the most to cut corners, project recovery is a time to return to basics. The plan de- effective means of scribed here is consistent with the four pillars of rapid development: avoid- introducing new technology, see “When to Deploy” ing classic mistakes, applying fundamental development practices, managing in Section 15.4. risks, and looking for ways to apply speed-oriented practices.
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Web site design and hosting - Chapter 16: Project Recovery Increase the process

Friday, October 26th, 2007

Chapter 16: Project Recovery Increase the process productivity by focusing on short-term improvements. Face the fact that the software will not be ready on time, slip the schedule, and proceed with damage control, possibly including canceling the project. Combine these three approaches and a fourth approach emerges: Drop a few features, increase productivity as much as you can, and slip the schedule as needed. This last approach is the option that this chapter describes. Philosophy When you’re in project-recovery mode, it’s easy to focus on the “wrong issue: how to finish quickly, how to catch up? This is rarely the real problem. For projects that are in this much trouble, the primary problem is usually how to finish at all. There are lots of directions to go with a recovery plan; the plan in this chapter focuses on regaining project control. “Control” can have a negative connotation, especially to independent-minded developers, but I don’t think it’s possible to rescue a project without concentrating on it. In my experience, as well as the experiences captured in Software Engineering Institute audits and other published and anecdotal reports, the most common reason that projects get into trouble in the first place is that they have not been adequately controlled. A desire for all-out development speed leads projects to take unwise shortcuts, and they inadvertently sacrifice real development speed in the bargain. In the end, there is so little control that neither developers nor managers even know how far off track their projects are. It’s difficult to take back control that you’ve given away, so the moment that you and your team are forced to confront the reality that recovery is needed represents a singular leadership opportunity. It gives you a chance to redefine your project in fundamental ways, which you can’t do if your project is in only a little trouble. This is a time for decisive action. If you’re going to make changes, make big changes and make them all at once. Lots of small corrections are demoralizing to the development team and make it look to your management like you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s easier to recapture control all at once than it is to try to.take back a little now and a little more later.
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16.1 General Recovery Options Case Study (Free web hosting music) 16-1. An

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

16.1 General Recovery Options Case Study 16-1. An Unsuccessful Project Recovery, continued 16.1 General-Recovery Options Only three fundamental approaches are available to someone rescuing a project: Cut the size of the software so that you can build it within the time and effort planned.
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Web hosting support - Chapter 16: Project Recovery * The project is

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

Chapter 16: Project Recovery * The project is on the verge of being canceled; customers and managers are actively considering that option. * The morale of the development team has hit rock bottom. The fun has gone out of the project, and the team members are grim. To save a project that’s in this much trouble, minor adjustments won’t work. You need to take strong corrective action. This chapter describes a strong rescue plan. Case Study 16-1. An Unsuccessful Project Recovery
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