Project Management - get it right and you'll have happy workers and satisfied customers

Steve Stopps has been leading tech projects for over two decades across many sectors: combining sales, marketing, analytics and production expertise. Steve founded Team Lumo, the creators of the multi award winning mobile games like Kumo Lumo, Paper Titans, Lumo Deliveries and Lumo’s Cat. He is also one of the founders and directors of the innovative shared workspace; Arch Creatives.

Project Management can be one of the most important, but misunderstood roles within a company. I often hear people say “we were fine before we had a project manager, why do we need one now”. Hopefully over the next few paragraphs I can help explain why we are important.

First, let’s look at a simple business case for a project manager. Imagine that you have a team of 10 people working on a project. They cost your business £5,000 per person per month (including all of your overheads). If this team take 3 months to complete a job, and you will be paid £200,000 by the customer, your costs are £150,000 and you will make £50,000 profit. However, for every week your team over runs, your profit is reduced by £12,500. If the job takes longer than 4 months then you start losing money. 

The first job of a project manager is to help things run on time and on budget.

Imagine you deliver the product on time. However, the client is not happy. It doesn’t meet their expectations, and they want changes. Again, every week of additional work reduces your profit. The second job of the project manager is to ensure the project is delivered to the customers’ expectations.

In my experience, project managers are very good at the first job, but often not so good at the second (myself included). I spent years delivering what we call “technical successes”, where we met all of the objectives set out in the customer brief, but without delivering what the customer really wanted. There is an old adage “customers don’t know what they want until you show them what they don’t want”. This is why so many customer facing businesses end up vilifying customers as difficult or demanding. Where, in reality, the customer only wants to pay for the deliverables that were in in their head when they commissioned the work. The difficulty is this; How do you find out exactly what your customer is thinking? Not many of us are psychic (project managers included). I cannot begin to imagine how much business is lost though reworking deliverables and a lack of repeat business. However, if you learn to value and adapt to customer feedback you can succeed where others have failed!

For the first 15 years of project management I used traditional top down approaches to planning and management. I had read about Agile development, and seen it in action, but was deeply sceptical and felt it had many flaws (and in the early days I maintain it did). However, 5 years ago I attended Scrum Master training. I was probably the worst possible delegate. Still deeply sceptical, I asked hundreds of questions based on everything I had seen go wrong. The trainer had it all covered, and by the end of the session I was convinced. But that is theory, what about practice? Well, 5 years later I have used nothing but Agile and have delivered 4 award winning projects on time and on budget, exceeding stakeholder expectations. I now feel confident in saying Scrum works! But why is it so good?

First up, I’d like to clarify that Scrum is just one specific Agile method. There are many ways of implementing Agile and it very flexible. However, I will focus on Scrum as it is one of the more fully formed methods.

Mostly Scrum works by entrusting the team to take accountability and responsibility for their own work. It gives them a framework to track their progress against clear goals. In addition, it provides a clear opportunity for the customer to provide feedback and the team to learn more about a customer’s actual requirements. This leads to motivated teams and happy customers. However, achieving this utopia is not without its challenges.

What do I mean when I say Agile?
Agile project management is where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organising cross-functional teams and stakeholders. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change. 

Scrum is a specific framework of rules set for managing agile projects. Scrum projects run like this:
 
1. The customer creates a prioritised wish list. 
2. During planning, the team pulls a small chunk from the top of that wish list, and decides how to implement those pieces. 
3. The team has a certain amount of time (usually two weeks) to complete its work, but it meets each day to assess its progress. 
4. At the end of the two weeks, the work should be potentially shippable: ready to hand to a customer, put on a store shelf, or show to a stakeholder. 
5. The 2 weeks end with a review of the work delivered, and a discussion about how to improve.
6. As the next phase of work begins, the team chooses another chunk of tasks from the wish list and work begins again. 

The process is really simple. However, there are many things that can go wrong.

Firstly it is vital that the team decide what tasks can be completed in the 2 weeks of work (not the customer or a manager). It is the act of the team planning and agreeing to the work they will undertake that provides the sense of ownership and self-actualisation that are vital to success. Management often feel nervous that the team won’t take on enough work, or will under perform. However, in my experience the opposite is often true; initially teams will commit to more work than is achievable. Later they will get better and better at estimating, but this takes real trust throughout the organisation, and this can be scary for everyone - especially for the first few weeks.

In addition, because the customer has regular, short, deliverables, they have direct input into the development of their product. This not only gives the customer a greater sense of ownership, but helps the team better understand their actual requirements - delivering a more nuanced understanding than any document can ever achieve. It also provides the flexibility required for customers changing requirements as they develop a greater understand of their product. Most importantly, because the delivery intervals are so short, the amount of waste is significantly reduced should the customer change their mind (and they will). Customers can add new ideas, choosing either to remove other features or extend the project. This approach can lead to long-term continuous relationships with customers.

I have delivered several amazing products with wonderful, inspiring teams since adopting Agile, and I have trained hundreds of other people in the successful implementation of Scrum. It is so rewarding to see them all thrive and excel. Happy workers and customers really is possible, and as importantly, can be profitable.

Steve provides production mentoring and support for businesses of all shapes and sizes: steve@kumotion.co.uk