Posting from a restaurant bar by the ATL airport…
Halfway through the course now.
In this lesson we discuss deliverables and stakeholders.
Deliverables are the tangible (products) and intangible (reports, lessons learned, etc) that come out of a project. You should have set up, as PM, your deliverables at the end of each phase. These can stop a project cold and determine if you are on track or not.
Clearly define your project deliverables; don’t know a better way to say it rather than that.
Ok…so … once deliverable are set, that’s it, right?
Nope. Change is the only constant.
:: Customer Needs :: How to control Deliverables…
Quality Function Deployment (QFD)
Through the inclusion of customers, a marketing/sales person, tech person in the trenches in defining and refining needs at every stage. More on this later.
Stakeholders::
These people sing the project electric (anyone get that?). What they say goes down on paper, but when the tangible is produced, this is where you really find out if you are successful or not. Indirect stakeholders are the communities that are affected that may not know they are affected until a project starts. For example, when the teardown of my stucco home is started to convert it to brick and the guys working outside my home are shirtless and muscled and working past 9pm – the indirect stakeholders are my neighbors who have to deal with the noise or maybe they are just offended by the fact that in my contract I asked that the men not wear any shirts. (gotta use your imagination with indirect stakeholders)
Conflicts will normally arise like:
- Priorities
- Procedures
- Trade-Offs (my boss says that project are a 3 legged stool – ping, power and pipe – if you short change one, the other’s need to compensate) or cost, performance and time
- Personalities
PMs need excellent negotiating skills to combat things as they arise.
thisisalonglesson
Approval of Deliverables
Arrange meetings of like stakeholders, review deliverables, get signoff in writing. Move forward.
Four Methods to Idea Generation
- Brainstorming – just write down each idea in a group – do not discuss go go go
- Brainwriting – everyone writes down ideas on paper and the papers shuffle around and more ideas are written down (good for a diametric group) – also no discussion
- Nominal Group Technique (NGT) – starting with Brainwriting and then write each one publicly on a board and anyone can jump in and add to it until all ideas are addressed – but not discussed yet
- Affinity Diagrams – each person write down one idea on their own index cart, then go to a board and post each answer silently into logical groups, then arrange and rearrange then this leads into brainstorming
Develop project plans based on consensus (and PM experience).
Done now.
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