An Excellent Video: Agile Product Ownership In A Nutshell: Henrik Kniberg

This is an excellent video by Henrik Kniberg talking about Project Owner with a vision, Stakeholders, Development Team, User Stories, Capacity of delivering 4-6 user stories in a week by development team. This 15 minutes video is quite interesting and attention grabbing in terms of the information it provides on project management and the product ownership in an Agile Project.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/an-excellent-video-agile-product-ownership-in-a-nutshell-henrik-kniberg/

An Excellent Video: How to Reward Your Team: Project Management

Here is an excellent video from Jennifer, Director at ProjectManager.com which is quite concrete, crisp and comprehensive. A must watch for all project managers across the globe.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/an-excellent-video-how-to-reward-your-team-project-management/

Revival of Facebook Mobile Ad Revenue: An Excellent Project Showcase

When Facebook launched its IPO in 2012 under heavy expectations, speculations and rumors from investors, public and corporate world; it never knew the bad treatment it was going to get when the prices were reached to half in a period of 3 months. Keen watchers remained stuck to the movement of its stocks in the market. Either Facebook has remained as a secret planner for earning money without disclosing its strategies in advance, or the financial stalwarts have not been able to judge the weakness or strength of its scrip.

There is no doubt that after the launch of its IPO, Facebook had a bad period of struggle in the market. The projected inflows and earnings were not as per the agenda and even during a period of one year after the launch, Facebook's earning from mobile advertising was not as it had anticipated. The speculations and rumors have been sidelined with the latest press release by Facebook where they declared their earnings for the second quarter of 2014. As per the results, Facebook has achieved to increase its revenue to 67%. Its weakest area of earnings through mobile ads has become now quite a strong piece of the overall revenue by having a contribution of 60%.

With increasing profit margins and its end users base, Facebook has become a top most ranker in terms of ad seller. With these results announced, Facebook shares price had a whooping jump by 5% and the current share price of USD 75.2 is almost double of the initial offering of USD 38 IPO.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/revival-of-facebook-mobile-ad-revenue-an-excellent-project-showcase/

13 Facts About Extreme Programming

Extreme Programming is one of the aspect of Agile Processes and probably among the most popular ones.


It has proven and established its success on global front

It is independent of the project size, industry size or industry type.

The topmost priority of Extreme programming is customer.

It focuses on delivering what is actually required by the organization rather than talking about a delivery of big elephant with no clear vision of delivery date.

Instead of committing to produce everything it promises to produce what is the first need of organization. So once this gets delivered the next most important requirement becomes the first.

This way Extreme Programming never takes complete customer requirements in one go. It starts with outer periphery moving inwards.

It has proven its capability in providing a last minute change in the business requirement even during the time of delivery in a swift manner.

It puts a high emphasis on team collaboration and customer engagement in a constant manner.

Its simple mechanism has proved to be highly effective and productive.

It talks about least monitoring and high amount of self organization to produce highly efficient results.

The role of tester begins along with the developer and both go hand in hand.

Above with continuous engagement with customer promises to deliver any suggested changes with quicker implementation.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/13-facts-about-extreme-programming/

Scope of User Stories

In continuation from my previous post on user stories, the basic fact about user stories remains established that it is a powerful mechanism to drive a project in a more promising mode. The results are more predictive in this way, quicker, and the whole game is played with a very low risk. Driving a new application development project based on user stories is not only interesting but high result oriented also.

User stories must be strongly depicted to provide low risk clue to declare the timelines. Release of user stories depends varies not more that 3 weeks and less than a week. While the development team starts working on a specific user story, it must be carried out in a most isolated state, with no interference, no other priorities and no alterations in plans. The developers must be very clear about the scope and boundaries of story. If a story is stretching beyond 3 weeks for its release, it needs to be fragmented into smaller pieces so as to arrive arrive within the limit of 1 to 3 weeks.

Similarly if a story is estimated to be released in less than a week's time, it needs to be added to some other stories so as to lengthen the release time but keeping in mind that the combined time should not go beyond 3 weeks. A release plan contains release dates of a number of such user stories. Stories are always business process centric. 

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/scope-of-user-stories/

My Top 10 Posts Of 2013 On Project Management And Quality Assurance

The list of my top 10 blog posts on Project Management and Quality Assurance are as below:

The link for these posts is: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/

1. What is a Testing environment for software testing?
2. Twelve essential Steps of Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC)
3. 10 Skills to make a perfect Project Manager
4. Ten Differences Between Project Manager and Project Leader
5. 5 essentials while building test environment for software testing
6. Eight Goal Settings for Software Developers
7. Eleven Skills For Product Manager To Win Over Any Situation
8. Five Excellent Quotes On Quality
9. Project Task Prioritization With Eisenhower Matrix
10. What Is ETL Testing – An Overview

How Do You Define Quality

Following was the question I was asked today by a Doctoral Candidate in Educational Technology & eLearning today.

When it comes to leading a huge QA team such as your position, how do you define ‘quality’? Why ‘quality’ matters to you?
(QA professionals are asked by the organization/customers during every project as how they would define quality. Do quality differs in each one’s perspective? Because, not everyone view in the same way. What would be your input on this?)

My answer to this question could lead to many posts. In a summary my answer would be as below that I would be elaborating further in next few posts to come:

1. Quality Is a Mandate for me without which no individual, no process, no business, no product, no project, no function and no organization can survive in today’s competitive world.

2. Quality is Objective and has to be defined in a clear cut measurable manner. It cannot be a subjective manner. It is a tool to draw out best possible positive results to meet expectations and timelines.

3. Quality is a TOOL for Human mind and not a tool to be used by a human mind. It has to be in the blood of a person to live with all the time.

4. Quality is NOT Speed to deliver a product where while delivering it compromises by any means. It has to be a balancing act between Delivery and Awareness of Completeness.

5. Quality cannot happen in Isolation. It is a team work – inter and intra both.

6. Quality is Synchronization and unanimous consolidation.

Would be taking it up further in my next posts.

An Ever Growing Tussle Between Product And Quality Leads

For generations there is a fundamentally ongoing fight between the product team and the quality team of any project. This is a generic fight for which there has not been a solution found so far. The fight is as below.

Product manager and his team always think that their product is fantastically built as per customer requirement with 100% requirements business needs met while building it. And the product is bug free. They further have a mindset that the product when goes to quality for internal testing on a test bed similar to live environment, the testing team takes extra long time with an intention of overstretching the whole exercise of testing just to maintain their importance intact. 

According to product team 90% of the bugs are either unnecessarily listed to build the test report long with large number of bug findings or the similar kind of bugs are repeated for the same purpose.

Top 5 Priorities Of A Project Manager For 2014

Learning keeps on adding ‘value’ ingredient in the professional life of a project manager. Project manager has to be a quick learner and grasping agent to get the crux of matter so as to adopt enhanced process of managing his projects. Every project brings in a new bouquet of learning. The shortfalls and failures bring in a determination of not repeating the same in next upcoming projects. The successes carry on with a message of maintaining the same in forthcoming projects.

Let us look at the top 5 priorities that would be on cards of a project manager during the year 2014:

1. Requirements: Focus will be there to grab business and customer requirements as crisply and elaborately as possible. Requirements and business processes do not change on daily basis once they get established and optimized. During such changes happening there would be a risk of changes in the requirements but then it has to be handled in a matured manner.

2. Documentation: Documentation has been a consistent pain for project managers at the time of project crunch and hence needs to be managed appropriately.

3. Reviews: Project progress review control mechanism need to be redefined with customer as an active participant in all review meetings where the requirements and progress is to be discussed. The process of project review has to be more transparent for the benefit of all by engaging all stakeholders.

4. Closures: Each closure has to be signed off in a structured manner so as to ensure compliance to customer needs.

5. Teams: It is not difficult to get best of the people but to retain them is. Focus on engaging your team members beyond work prepositions so as to have an emotional tie up with the organization and work.

Top 5 Priorities Of A Test Lead For 2014

The success of a project is driven by the teams that work on it. Besides various other factors and logistics, it is always the team that matters most because static and non living things do not think and act according to changing environment and conditions but it is the human mind that has an ability to work efficiently even under stressed and constrained conditions. That is why the people factor remains on top always.

For Test Lead top 5 priorities on card for the year 2014 would be:

1. Requirements: Understanding of customer and business requirements beyond what has been documented by the analysts will be very important. It will be good if QC guy gets a chance to walk through the business process of the customer thoroughly.

2. Documentation: Documentation includes a lot and means a lot for QC. Right from test case building, test report, bug closure report and so on.

3. Experience: Testing is one expertise and business knowledge is another. Former comes from learning and education whereas latter comes from experience and wisdom. A tester needs to have both these expertise in a balanced form so as to align both the roads properly.

4. Team: Management of team, allocation of resources and retaining the best of resources is an art that needs to be learnt and managed.

5. Learning: Learning is a process that needs to be built in a structured manner. Learning must come from each project, each success, each failure and so on.

Top 5 Projects In Demand During 2014

5 type of projects will be in high demand during 2014 as listed below:

1. Education: Projects based on education delivery in a smarter way will in
    demand globally.

2. Retail: Systems to make retail business more comfortable, versatile and
    widely acceptable.

3. Security & Privacy: Demand will be high in making systems more
    secured while keeping privacy intact over the internet/ cloud.

4. Health: Global health management systems will be high in demand.

5. Governance: Management of public utilities, systems and facilities in an
    automated secured manner.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/top-5-projects-in-demand-during-2014/

Impact Of Changes In Requirements And Commitment On Project Delays

For a successful project, the credit goes to the whole team. But for a project delayed or failed the one man in crisis is the project manager. Whatsoever the reasons may be for this delay/ failure but it is the project manager that has to bear the brunt. Let us look at the topmost reasons that cause project delay or project failure:

1. Change Management: The initial requirements from customer leads to development but as the work progresses, fresh requirements or changes in the existing requirements keep pumping in from customer end. There is no wonder about it to happen and one should take it as a natural phenomenon. After releasing their initial set of requirements, customer think tank keeps pondering over what else could be achieved which lead to these requirements. Critical part is to grab these requirements with a positive note, analyze well and segregate these requirements to two parts – to be added, or to be reverted back to customer with a justification for not adding it.

2. Commitment: For business critical apps development there is a deep rooted commitment required from each section, from each of the stakeholder. If that does not happen, there are chances of missing some important handling in time that could lead to a big disaster if raised at a later stage. It has been seen that if customer key users are not engaged well in time initially during the development phase for clearing off units built have higher risk of facing major setbacks in progress of project.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/impact-of-changes-in-requirements-and-commitment-on-project-delays/

Pitfalls of Project Managers Changing Jobs In Short Duration

It is very interesting to note that there is a group of project managers who do not stay in an organization for long. They set a rule not to stay longer than 2 years or so. Or maybe the rule gets imposed on them automatically due to their own pitfalls to enable them to keep surviving in the ecosystem. Let us look at what makes it happen in case of such project managers. The main factors could be their attitude or lifestyle.

These guys are not fundamentally strong in their project management skills. They appear to be confident and strong get goers in their talks but not in their walk. They talk high about their past achievements which probably they have never achieved in reality. They are good in ensuring management about their capability in handling any kind of tight situations and tough projects but in actual they have their plans of exit at right moment well in advance.

They will not be able to run projects well and that will apparently start appearing after a short while. They would spend their intelligence not in learning business, processes and procedures; but on how smartly to shift cap to one or the other instead of owning it. Logically at the point of insertion in the beginning itself should raise eyebrows of the management for such candidates who have appeared for candidature with a track record of spending not significant time in their previous organizations.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/pitfalls-of-project-managers-changing-jobs-in-short-duration/

How Much Tech Savvy A Project Manager Should Be?

Keep pace with the Technology: The way technologies are changing at a very fast pace, it will be foolish to stay with your legacy technology running for years whereas the world is adopting newer technologies for the similar kind of projects. There is no doubt that when the existing technology was selected, it would have been a state of the art and latest of the technologies kind of solution. But remember that over a period of time, technologies get faded away in wake of newer, robust and advanced technology entrants.

Remember that development for all business apps start with a prerequisite set of requirements basis which timelines and plans are built and team sizing, resources etc. are set. Once this business requirement is converted to an app, it is released on Test Server, Staging Server and Live Server respectively for QC, UAT and go-live in the same pattern. Gradually when this app is handed over to end users on go-live environment, the app usage starts triggering along with the desired business results chickening out.

But story does not end here. New requirements that either go to changes in existing functionalities or new functionality built keep pouring in there by reshaping the size and environment of your existing app. That is where your awareness towards newer technologies to manage and control any kind of crunch in the existing one, is very critical.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/how-much-tech-savvy-a-project-manager-should-be/

3 Fundamental Pillars To Drive Your Project To Success

Methodology & Approach: Every project does not fall in a generic project methodology. It is important to understand the type of project before making it enlisted under a particular project methodology. For this, based on the projects undertaken and new upcoming ones, relevant project methodologies to be identified and defined. Right project methodology helps project manager and other teams to ensure following right processes and documentations for each project phase in that methodology. A new project marked in wrong methodology could lead to extreme level of confusion and thus leading to failures.

Issue Management: Issues are integral part of any project arising during any of the phases of a project. Taking issues in a lighter way could lead to losing the right direction of a project and hence getting it derailed from its progress track. A single issue management charter with process driven approach with right & understandable definition of issue, its categorization, its severity and its closure with identification of ‘who’ is responsible for closure of issue, is very important. Any issue, howsoever small, could lead to a big disaster. A regular review is a must.

Communications: Be it project management, team management or issues management; nothing will move in right direction, if inappropriate or incomplete or missing communications happen during a project. Project manager must ensure to graduate each of the team members and team leads on how to handle communications and its importance. Right kind of information, to right people, at right time with right kind of actions required must be a set protocol of communications. For example, if a piece of information is just for the sake of information, or an action is required, along with its criticality, should be the right approach to manage.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/3-fundamental-pillars-to-drive-your-project-to-success/

Why Date Constrained Projects Go Uncontrolled?

It happens at times when you have a mission critical project with tight timelines from customer that increases its stake manifold, for which you place best of your teams comprising of high skills and experience, and on top of it you provide state of the art tools to tackle all kind of situations; and still the timelines are not met and things go out of control. It is always important to go for a deep analysis for such kind of failures to such an extent that the shortfalls are identified with their core reasons; and are sidelined once for all, for all forthcoming similar kind of projects.

It is well said that disciplined approach and hard work pay well in comparison to merely hard work. Well defined processes and procedures play a major role in this. If these are in place, it makes your tasks easier in managing and guiding your teams. Since there is no differentiation among teams and the standard procedures apply to everyone, irrespective of who and what, the same procedures need to be followed.

Growing these skills is as important for immature teams, as is for matured teams to keep nurturing and excelling in these.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/why-date-constrained-projects-go-uncontrolled/

3 Critical Weapons For Winning A Battle Called Project Management

If you really want to be a successful project manager you need to acquire following three powerful weapons so as to be a winner all the time whether the conditions are favorable or you are travelling in rough seas. The teams that are formed usually have all mixes of human beings having different styles of working and delivering results in different fashions. Overall momentum is something which need to be maintained all the time to race along the ticking clock. The three important and potent weapons that can help you are as below:

Skills: You need to have high quality project management skills to win your battle. If you are leading a team of unbeatable and brave soldiers but lacking the same in you, would not lead you to a winning situation.

Tools: Whether it is project management tools, bug tracking tools or incident recording tools – you need to assess your needs and acquire these tools accordingly. Overstuffing yourself beyond required commodities will lead to a burden on your head. But vice versa also holds equally good meaning if you are underestimating your needs and go for the battle along with your team with shortage of armory, your defeat is sealed right in the beginning.

Experience: Guys with rich experience under their belt and laurels shining on their shirts are always moral boosters in the teams. Hence it is important to have such guys, at least one in each team to keep overall tempo at high pitch all the time.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/3-critical-weapons-for-winning-a-battle-called-project-management/

All Projects Face Budget Constraints

Budget for any project is allocated right at its initiation phase. Budgeting includes lot of factors but the main factor remains customer defined timelines. Keeping this target defined by customer in mind, a backward calculation is done and accordingly time allocation to each phase is done, team sizing is defined and resource planning is done. After all it is customer that matters the most.

Well, it does not mean that there is a scope of comparison even if this backward calculation is being done. Two prime factors that play a major role in this whole game is quality and finances. Budgeting beyond optimum level and compromising with quality of the product will mar the beauty of product and impact on business badly. When timelines are shorter there is another way of pulling your socks and not letting you beaten down. It requires higher level of skilled task force, error free tools and rich experience to win over in such kind of wars.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/all-projects-face-budget-constraints/

Meaning of CTTR In Project Management

Project Management mainly comprises of converting customer requirements and business needs to an application so as to enable customer in running its business in a much smoother and error free environment. It needs to be imbibed of business processes, workflow (if required by customer) and minimization of manual interventions to a maximum extent. Any business process that speaks about business enhancement, improvisation and optimization by transforming it from manual to automation enabled through coding needs to be thrown into a dustbin.

Timelines of a project are mostly defined as per customer guidelines. At times it is important for a customer to get a solution within a stipulated time frame if the app is related to a pre-scheduled launch in a big way and the app is going to play a major role in that particular launch. Usually a project where customer has no say in desired results’ release timelines especially when it is a customer sponsored project, it is definitely a major glitch. Either the requirements are not serious or customer has no intentions to pay for the product later.

CTTR is Customer Time To Release which means the timelines defined by the customer regarding release of product. All project timelines, budgeting and allocations are a total derivative of CTTR.

Source: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/meaning-of-cttr-in-project-management/

4 Takeaways From PMP For Project Management

PMP is a good source in two aspects. One, it gives you a great insight on how to manage your projects in a more efficient and risk free manner. Second, if you appear for its exam and qualify, you get a universally accepted accreditation that is highly appreciated worldwide. PMP (Project Management Professional ®) offered globally by PMI is a boundary free certification. During your learning towards PMP you learn a lot about project management something that you have never learnt before or come across during any other kind of learning towards project management.

Four takeaways that you can be assured of during your learning of PMP can be listed as below:

1.    It provides you a well-organized and highly structured method of managing your projects and related activities. The inbuilt flexibility enables you to design your project management methodologies as per your company’s requirements.

2.    You get empowered and leveraged to take full control of your project(s) and mitigate risks anticipated in advance (or those come in the way in an unannounced manner). Your learning gets enhanced to enable you to plan, execute, monitor, control and steer your projects in a professionally organized manner without getting drifted away from best practices being followed across the globe, similar to your industry.

3.    You get an enormous amount of knowledge on understanding gravity of documentation required for your kind of projects running in your organization. It helps you in planning and controlling scope, teams, financials, schedules/ timelines, quality, risks and closures in a way so as to assist you in achieving higher level of success in any kind of projects undertaken.

4.    You get well equipped with the tools and techniques to monitor the timelines of your project in a proactive manner with an advanced way of getting you informed about any contingencies prone to occur during project lifecycle.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/4-takeaways-from-pmp-for-project-management/