Midwest IT Survival

Today's IT Projects Need Transparency to Change

For large organizations it seems that as technology grows more and more integrated, IT related projects become more complex and thus longer in overall duration. There is no doubt the rise in cloud/SaaS solutions has exacerbated this increase in overall IT project complexity. I’ve written on the impact of cloud in this manner prior here. Gone are the days of a large corporate IT shop having a project manager engage the same three or four familiar delivery stakeholders and with little outside involvement, execute the project beginning to end. This increase in technical integration means a project manager can no longer count on those three or four stakeholders having the cross systems knowledge and technical systems access to implement changes as crisply with few artifacts as to what the project has done/is doing/when/etc.

To help illustrate this evolving shift, consider the following hypothetical large corporate IT conversation:

PM: “Welcome everyone to the FlimFlam upgrade project’s twentieth weekly status meeting and a special welcome to Jim who is joining to help sort out all the changes that impact others outside of our core team.”

<General welcoming gestures and verbal niceties ensue>

Jim: “Ok, is there any diagram that captures all the flows of data in and out of the current FlimFlam system?”

Core Team: “Um, no, we just know them from working on FlimFlam for the last five years.”

Jim: “Um, ok, have you mapped out what new features of the upgrade are turned on compared to off and who would be affected? Or say, documented the link between the features and business requirements?”

Core Team: “Well, not documented, but we know HR wants the real-time instead of batch interaction and Operations wants better reports. But HR outsourced last year to a cloud provider and we have no idea what Operations is doing …”

Jim: <thinking to himself> “… oh boy, good people, but this project is looking like a train wreck already …”

Clearly a “business as usual” approach to this upgrade isn’t going to work any more.

In the past, with so few stakeholders having comprehensive access to the silo-ed systems impacted by these types of changes, the need for easy to digest transparency into what changes were going to happen when and how was not critical. Sometimes the only visibility to what such a small project team was doing was in the production change management review and approval process:

Change Control Board: “Ok, next up is change record number 72,578 which reads ‘Enable the employee web portal to support the time off calendar’. Anyone here have any concerns with this change? Hearing none, approved. Next on the list …

Today’s Problem: IT systems are too interconnected for lack of project transparency to change

Sounds like 72,578 is a simple change that an HR delivery team of the past could have easily implemented without much cross team impact. But today, that example time off calendar may need to interact with the HR system to record those time off days against how many the employee actually has as part of their compensation package. There probably is a need to support some management approval work-flow. Plus, there are probably other work scheduling systems and PMO resource planning tools that need a feed of that data in order to accurately support their user base. There is probably some single sign on/web access management technology involved to support all employees accessing the web portal, some central provisioning system to handle access plus some remote access needs to support today’s mobile workforce. It is probably safe to assume that some of those integrated systems are in-house and some are cloud/SaaS or a mix of all of the above.

Additionally, with matrix-ed internal and external project resources with contracted and off-shore delivery coupled with the “cloud” vendor resource engagement model, a simple change could have a variety of stakeholders in need of agreement on what is changing when, etc.

Thus, hopefully I’ve convinced you that something as simple as a web portal for employee time off entry can involve a number of different internal and external teams and systems that all need to coordinate changes to support the business objectives of this example project.

So how does this all drive the need for “transparency”? Isn’t this just a basic PMO 101 issue of dependency management and cross project impacts?

Yes and No

The project team needs to produce deliverables that don’t just get the core team in agreement to pass the next quality gate in the project life-cycle (never to be revised again); the project team needs to produce deliverables that outline, at a high-level, the following basic project elements:

• Scope of the project in a sentence or two
• What is changing from present to future state
• Who is impacted by the change (and have they been engaged)
• Lastly, what isn’t in scope (that a non-core stakeholder might assume is in scope)

… for non-core stakeholders to easily digest and understand … and update the material frequently to have at the ready anytime it might be needed.

Besides an effective communications vehicle, another subtle yet important aspect to this deliverable is its ability to build confidence in the effective management of your project in outside stakeholders. This confidence can lead to senior management getting the impression the project is “under control” and move on to another project for increased scrutiny rather than assigning all kinds of ancillary people to dig into your project to figure out why they don’t have that “under control” feeling.

Stated another way, large corporate IT projects today need to adopt a bit of “program management”, specifically, some of the enterprise reporting themes. A Gantt chart (which I’ve extolled the benefits of before here) isn’t the end-all-be-all here. A slide deck that contains a few slides covering these topics with lots of pictures and drawings where ever possible would be more effective in serving this communication need.

So if you are a project sponsor or a project manager, consider having a communication deliverable that is actively maintained, even if your PMO PLC doesn’t explicitly call for one, to provide simple and easy to digest transparency into key aspects of your project at the ready at all

A Single View of the Work is a powerful management capability

Well, what started back in mid 2009 as a few blog posts to capture a systematic approach to trying to get a handle on the various ways work requests come to a delivery focused team exploded into a 14,000 word, 13 part blog posting series on the topic. I managed three different delivery teams within three different companies within three different industries while this topic was being explored. The diversity of the teams, the size of the overall organizations (6 member team in 2,000 person IT department within 36,000 employees, 21 member team in 40 IT person department within 300 employees and 8 member team in 100 IT person department within 7,000 employees) and the industries (financial services, legal services and manufacturing) all helped to give me confidence to present the model described throughout this series.

Clearly the theme throughout this series is to use data where ever possible to represent all facets of the work your team is doing. In all three companies I received extremely positive feedback for the effectiveness of my approach from my management. Thus, I felt confident to share my approach with others in hopes others would find a way to adopt some of the techniques to enhance their management function.

Below is a brief summary of the key take-aways and techniques presented in each of the parts of this series in case readers missed any parts along the way or are interested in reading more about a particular topic:

Part 1

Starts the series by requesting you make a list of all the high level service delivery attributes of your team. Next, you are asked to list out the various ways work arrives to your team for each attribute that was documented. Additionally, if there was specific technology under the umbrella of services your team provides, document those and include relevant dates of version upgrades and version end-of-life conditions that represents work you know your team has to perform.

Part 2

Part 2 extends the list in part 1 to start to derive a model for how your team operates. You are asked to identify how much influence you have over each work attribute. Those attributes of which you have a high degree of influence means you are in a position to plan out the work. Those of which you have little influence means you are reacting to the work. For the attributes with little to no influence, you are requested to identify sources of predictive data such as historical request metrics and duration data to form trends. Additionally, you are asked to develop relationships with individuals and groups that are sources of work requests to assist in building work request pipelines.

Part 3

Now that a baseline work request attribute and influence system has formed, you are guided through the thought process of determining how much capacity your team has to actually deliver work. The familiar topic of an eight hour day doesn’t really mean each team member can focus eight hours on work requests is discussed to arrive at a data supported, more realistic number of hours per day to dedicate to service request work.

Part 4

Part 4 describes how to apply the numbers your collected in part 3 towards juggling high and low influences over the requested work scheduling. How to communicate this juggling by using data to your management and work requesters is also discussed.

Part 5

This part in the series describes how to take the low level numbers from the previous two parts and determine the true overall capacity your team has for doing work in a given time period. The excellent article on this pragmatic capacity planning by Peter Kretzman (http://peterkretzman.com) is also covered.

Part 6

Part 6 dives deeper into work requests that require some partial dedication of a resource on your team to a work effort and some of the nuances around safely committing to work deliverables knowing you don’t have fully dedicated resources.

Part 7

This part talks about how to integrate unplanned work requests into in flight work at a high level. Engagement models and other similar topics are also discussed.

Part 8

Now that the basics have been covered and a variety of work request patterns have been discussed, this part starts to walk you through how to build a comprehensive team resource plan.

Part 9

With Part 8 setting the framework for your team resource plan, Part 9 suggests how to sequence and represent detailed work requests. Additionally, having your team participate in the process as well as provide critical work estimation data is also covered.

Part 10

Now that the team resource plan has the majority of externally requested work represented, the addition of non-request work is covered. Topics such as “special projects” and “HR-ish” work is covered. What to include, what to not include and to what level of detail is the focus of this part.

Part 11

Now that you have a rather comprehensive team resource plan, this part describes mechanisms to help keep the plan from going stale. Additionally, how the plan improves your external perception as a manager is explored.

Part 12

This part extends your team resource plan to offer “what if” scenarios around the cost of working on a new hot priority request and how to use your team resource plan to assist with prioritization with your management and the requesters.

Part 13

This final part tackles one of the most challenging topics facing a team manager: how to justify a request for additional staff. The team resource plan is a critical tool in either forecasting forward or re-planning the past to use data to justify that staff add.

All in all, I hope you have enjoyed reading this series and found some element of it useful to you. I would appreciate any comments on the series as whole as far as its overall usefulness to you as well as any feedback around alternative approaches to topics I’ve outlined.

Focus on data to justify more staff

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, I described a few “what if” scenarios around handling competing priorities. This article will offer additional “what if” opportunities your plan enables you to explore surrounding team staffing levels.

“What If” Opportunities – Adding Another Team Member

Another extremely helpful “what if” opportunity is to show, with data, what adding another resource to the team would mean work delivery-wise. Every organization has a less than scientific way to permit team managers to establish business cases to justify adding more staff. Without data, a manager is left with less than optimal hunch based or eloquent prose based means of communicating the need. Now, with your sophisticated team source plan, you can either project forward or go back and re-plan history.

Project Forward – Strong Pipeline

If you have a more mature organization when it comes to planning you may very well have access to data that indicates what work your team will be tapped to do in some capacity in the coming year. This data will help you in presenting data to support your request for additional team members. Don’t fear if your organization doesn’t capture future work very effectively. The next section “Weak Pipeline” will help in that situation.

Create a copy of your resource plan and begin to add the projects and work requests listed for the coming year. Make some gross estimates as to your team’s involvement. Yes, there is indeed an art to these estimates. Involving your team members in this next year forecasting of work exercise will help to give you additional perspective as well as implicitly implicates your team members in the estimates themselves. I don’t suggest you go so far as break out your estimation templates and spend hours upon hours defining and estimating all possible details related to the future work. Rather, assigning big buckets of hours to “small”, “medium”, “large” and “mega-huge” work blobs is quite enough. Remember, your audience is your management team not the business requesters that will grasp feverishly at any dates available to them no matter how hastily concocted on a bar napkin. Thus, general estimates that can be plausibly linked to known work is more effective in achieving management buy in than overly detailed analysis.

Senior Management: “Upgrading FlimFlam next year is twice as much work as the FlimFlam disaster recovery project this year? Twice the planning? Full regression testing? Go live involves keeping the old version operational until all end users are cut over to the new version? Ok, twice as much work makes sense.”

Once you have the list of projects, using your new copy of your resource plan, start plugging in the project details using your current staff count. Next, make another copy of this future projected plan and look for skill set constraints and/or work completion dates that you know senior management isn’t going to be pleased to see. Add in hypothetical new hires with skill sets that significantly increase your ability to show a resource plan that accomplishes more work in less time. You might be surprised to see that the skill set you think you need isn’t as important as another skill set of which you figured you had plenty of capacity.

Re-plan History – Weak Pipeline

If you don’t have a strong work load pipeline outlined for the coming year, don’t give up hope. Take a copy of your resource plan from the previous year and look for where you had resource contention. Pretend you could wave a magic wand and have had additional resources join your team with those contended skill sets. Add in the number of team members you are asking for in the next fiscal/budget cycle year. Show a new plan from the previous year that indicates how much additional work your team would have accomplished given the addition of more staff. Your argument is that if you had these additional people last year, your team would have accomplished all this additional work. If next year looks to be even more work than last year then more staff is critical.

Next Steps – Weak or Strong Pipeline

Having a pipeline of new work for the coming year is a bit more powerful to present compared to re-planning  past year. But re-planning the past year is better than having no pipeline and throwing your hands up in despair and whining you need more staff] (external link to blog.brodzinski.com).

Pulling it Together

Lastly, consider adding some fudge factor for unplanned work that you know always pops up every year. One way to project forward for the unknown is to look back over the previous year and note all of the work that appeared out of no where. If you can articulate how you arrived at a percentage of unplanned versus planned work, you can apply that percentage to your next year plan. Make sure you can confidently explain how you derived that unplanned estimate that is based on a guess based on a whim. If you don’t feel confident you can stand behind your guess at unplanned work, don’t add it explicitly to your plan. Rather, just verbalize the plan you are presenting assumes there is no additional work hitting your team next year than what is already known. This conservatism will help offset any weaknesses in your existing projections. I’ve found that if you go into a meeting with senior management asking for additional staff and you have wild guesses based on wild guesses in your data, the value of the data diminishes to the point that senior management begins to lose confidence in your pitch overall for more staff. Rebuilding that confidence can be insurmountable.

Now, with more confidence based on your new plans, meet with senior management to share your reports:

Manager: “Looking forward to next year, I took the next budget year project pipeline data and based on currently known request scope, projected out work for next year based on my current team and their skill sets. What concerns me is that with all the business projects and their early start dates, the FlimFlam upgrade project looks like it can’t finish any earlier than the end of Q3. With Sally and Bob in demand on those business projects as well as the upgrade project, by adding another team member in early Q1, it allows the new team member to pick up some of those less complex business projects. This frees up Bob and Sally, and as I am showing on this alternative team resource plan, the FlimFlam upgrade project can start as early as late Q1. Thus, realistically the upgrade could be completed by end of Q2 rather than Q3. Additionally, these other business projects would complete months earlier as well since Bob and Sally can’t work on more than two projects at a time before quality is so poor and thrashing stresses commitment dates. That additional team member can significantly smooth out the spike in that skill set need for next year. Plus, we both know Sally and Bob have been in demand the last two years with work having to be scheduled around their commitments …”

With data in hand, this conversation is much more fact based compared to “I need more people because my gut says so.”

If you ultimately don’t get your staff add don’t be completely discouraged and give up on using your resource plan as a forecasting “what if” tool. If you’ve laid out the next year of work to your boss without the granting of additional FTE and people start complaining about your resources not being as available as they desire, you can take comfort that you made your boss aware. Thus, when his or her phone rings with people complaining because you can’t meet their needs, he or she shouldn’t be surprised. By presenting your boss with plausible data that he or she can’t support with more staff implicitly holds your boss accountable and you a bit less for the service availability complaints. Of course, you need to constantly look for ways to squeeze as much efficiency out of your resources and processes as possible. You don’t get a free pass as a manager to goof off just because your boss didn’t immediately provide you a new hire opportunity given your masterpiece of work load projections.

Additional “What Ifs”

There are certainly more “what if” possibilities you can do with your team resource plan. It can be very effective at communicating commitment deliverables and dates to project managers. It can help clearly articulate the schedule impacts related to multiple approaches to completing different goals within a project. “Adhering strictly to the architecture and delivery guidelines, these blobs of work look to start and end according to plan X. Being permitted to deviate from these specific delivery guidelines allows these blobs of work to be starting and ending according to plan Y.” It can help show what the impact is for doing certain tasks before other tasks to help others prioritize requests. There are many benefits to creating and maintaining a team resource plan. The next article will summarize all of the main points captured in this 13 part series of a structured team management strategy entitled “Single View of the Work”.

Drop everything and make project "X" the top priority!

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, I described how to keep your plan from going stale as well as the benefits to you as a manager for making resource plan a prominent source of data in all your delivery commitment discussions. This article will offer various “what if” opportunities your plan enables you to explore.

“What If” Opportunities – Drop Everything and Work on X

After all the work up till this point in building and maintaining your plan, here is where you can experience some real power of your team resource plan actually making your life easier. Consider this incredibly typical work scenario:

Senior Manager: The VP of Operations just told me the new FlimFlam upgrade project needs to start immediately and is now the most important project for everyone in the department to be working on.

Manager: No problem. Upgrading FlimFlam requires my team members Bob and Sally to be engaged to make system changes. I’ll let them know the new priority and I’ll communicate to the requesters/sponsors of what they are presently working on that their requests have been bumped in priority.

<Conversation continues>

During this conversation, by getting out your resource plan, you can easily identify what work Bob and Sally are presently engaged. You can share with your senior manager the impact of the priority change he or she is mandating. Before we go too far, there are some subtleties to this specifically structured response that I would like to call out:

1. You aren’t saying “No”.

Clearly, your manager is making a demand not asking a question. Thus, saying “No” isn’t an option just because it causes massive changes to your brilliantly crafted resource plan. There might be situations where telling your manager “No” is the right response, but I believe the majority of situations are best handled without a direct “No” as the immediate answer.

2. While agreeing, you are sharing the “cost” or impact of the shift in priority.

In a polite manner, you are agreeing to the request. But at the same time, you are sharing the “cost” or impact of what current work in flight will be paused and thus delayed as resources are shifted. In a non-threatening and non-confrontational way you are allowing your manager to get an appreciation for what work he or she is implicitly approving can be delayed. This subtle phrasing also allows your manager to consider if the “drop everything and work on X” is truly that important. You have allowed your manager to save face and possibly engage in a more detailed dialog around how to slot this new work in with existing work. In general, allowing your manager, the individual with the most direct impact on your paycheck, to save face and achieve their objectives as often as possible is always a good thing.

“What If” Opportunities – “Cost” of Working on Y

Another “what if” scenario that your resource plan can help you with is assessing the impact of asking resources to work on side or “special projects”. As an example, many times during the year pops up the potential need to know what features a new version of a system provides compared to the current. Another example would be a new technical capability that sounds on the surface to benefit your team but someone needs to dig into it to determine how much real benefit. Yet another involving software development teams is re-factoring existing code because what was put in production works, but really needs to be changed to meet standards/guidelines/ enterprise re-usability, etc. If your team is delivery focused, everyone is probably fully allocated to business work according to your plan thus asking anyone to put some time into a “special project” is going to add stress to that individual’s ability to meet their committed delivery dates.

Your resource plan gives you the ability to consider the impact of, say, adding some number of hours per week to a particular team member’s workload. There might exist enough slack time on a particular assignment within a project or work request to absorb those additional hours. If not, there might be the opportunity to contact the work requester and confirm that extending the delivery date by a few days is acceptable. Alternatively, you can schedule a few days/weeks of contiguous time after a delivery date for a particular resource to be dedicated to the “special project”. This way, you can work the “special project” assignment into that resource’s normal workload and delay uncommitted additional work items until the task is complete. This effectively treats the “special project” just like any other work request or project task forcing other tasks to be schedule around it. This gives you the ability to time box the “special project” with your team member so they can focus on this work without distraction as well as give them a clear end date when they need to have their work completed.

At this point, you have a few “what if” scenarios attributed to your team resource plan. In the next article, I’ll suggest more “what if” opportunities your resource plan possesses particularly around staff leveling.

How credible are you perceived?

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we finalized our Gantt chart listing all the external and internal work requests. We also added “HR-ish” activities and other categories of work that can impact delivery. This article will offer considerations on how to keep the data from becoming stale and how the plan benefits you as a manager.

Avoid Going Stale

Like any resource plan, it is only as accurate as the last time it was updated. You have put plenty of work up till this point in building your resource plan; don’t let it get stale. Consider making reviewing and updating the report a fixed agenda item for all one on ones and possibly some full team meetings. By sharing together with your full team you help team members get a sense of what others are working on. You never know one when team member will notice what someone else is working on and be able to offer some advice or alternative points to consider. If you are managing towards fostering a more self-organizing, self-directed team, which I’ve written about prior, this technique of sharing the resource plan with the entire team helps to communicate the broader workload. By encouraging team members to offer opinions and share perspectives on what others are working on organically moves your team towards more self-direction.

When it comes to updating your plan, to reduce the burden of taking notes then going back and updating the chart, consider updating the chart in real time with each of your team members. The real time update not only saves the burden of taking good notes and having good memory recall, it allows for immediate feedback and verification during your one on ones. Placing a copy of the report in a shared location for your team to view and update is great, but the additional value of making and talking through updates in real time can be exceedingly more valuable. Again, this is another opportunity to increase team member engagement through actively discussing what they are working on and capturing it in the plan.

Depending on your management style, the frequent real time update of the chart during one on ones could replace the classic weekly status report.

Management Perception Benefits

Now that you have an accurate and professional looking report of what work your team is doing, start to carry a paper copy around with you every where you go. Try and print out a copy of your most recent update on a large, single sheet of paper. Print a new copy after every major revision and discard the old copy. If it doesn’t appear clearly on the report, write the date of the latest revision. Consider setting a date range for the report of:

• Go back about one calendar week from the present date or the date you are printing.

This helps you answer questions pertaining to what transpired last week that impacts future projections. This is handy to be able to quickly respond to queries with: “Last week Sally was sick for two days and that is why her deliverable carried over into this week.”

• Report out a few months. Consider three months maximum.

Depending on the level of priority changes and work request adds/changes, you will probably discover that reporting out into the distant future isn’t all that helpful. Consider starting with three months and see how often you are discussing work requests that far in the future. The smaller your organization, more than likely, the shorter the future can be predicted. In truth, the level of maturity in work prioritization and forecasting in your organization will impact the frequency of report changes and the ability to project far into the future. The more mature the more consistent data available to reduce the frequency of changes to your plan. The less mature and more prone to “IT Instant Gratification” the more frequently you will be forced to re-juggle your resource plan.

By carrying around your plan and frequently referencing it in meetings, discussions, etc. you should notice a significant up tick in your external perceived management capabilities. Really? How so?

• Increase in perception of knowing what is going on

Sure, you might be able to keep everything you and your team is involved in at any given moment in time in your head. What is more likely the reality is:

As more and more work is being dump on you and your team, your brain is bound to get overwhelmed and loose details.

Thus, having a detailed report at your fingertips helps jog your memory reducing the chance you might miss something important in a discussion. Plus, when pressured to commit to deliverable dates, and what project manager doesn’t want you to commit to a magic date on the spot, you now have a legitimate excuse to pause, look at your plan, and then offer a more thought out response. Sometimes just the ability to inject a break in the pressure of the commitment exchange permits avoiding that hastily, in the moment, less than optimal reply.

• Increase in the credibility of your resource communications

Without report: “Bob is working on X now and should be done by Friday.”

With Report: Reviewing report prior to responding “Bob is working on X now and should be done by Friday.”

You are sharing the same message and very well could be using the exact same words in both cases. But, when you visibly reference some data prior to making your statement, your words are augmented with an increased incredibility. I attribute that increase to the external perception of being on top of what is going on and having data to support your statements that your resource plan gives you. Others don’t have any competing data, thus you have the more authoritative position in the conversation. The folks at Thinkshift Communications have developed a Credibility Quotient as a formal criteria for determining the level of credibility in one’s communications. As a factor in their ranking system, they specifically call out “Providing support for claims is the most important single contributor to credibility”. Sure, the corporate bureaucrats and smooth talking management pundits are able to talk circles around why something should be or needs to be delivered by a certain date. You can challenge back with equally crafted responses alone or remove the emotion and let data in your plan drive the discussion.

• Benefit of your responses having higher “stickiness”

The increase in the perception of you knowing what is going on and the resulting credibility in your responses nets you the benefit of having high “stickiness” in your responses. You will notice, especially in people that challenge your resource assignment or contention concerns, that over time you will see a dramatic drop off in the frequency and aggressiveness of challenges to your message. I directly attribute this increase in people taking you at what you say (rather than immediately challenging you) to the resource plan’s increase in your credibility.

At this point, you should have an accurate team resource plan that you have incorporated into your management work delivery commitment interaction discussions. In the next article, I’ll describe the additional power your resource plan possesses through it’s “what if” capabilities.

Consider tracking team member vacations on your resource plan

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we finalized our Gantt chart listing all the work requests and projects by work phase and indicated which team member is work on which phase with durations and dependencies from your team’s estimation sheets. Additionally, your team review of the chart increased its accuracy and improved your team’s level of engagement again. This article will offer considerations on what additional, non-external work to reflect on the chart for improved reporting.

HR-ish Stuff

The first non-external work data items to consider adding to the team resource plan are company holidays, mandatory “all hands” meetings and team member vacations. Basically, consider adding all the HR-ish stuff that requires your team’s time that results in the loss of the ability to work on other “real” activities. You may want to establish a threshold for the duration of HR-ish stuff to add. You may recall we calculated a real work day of five or six hours assuming 1:1’s, fire drills, performance reviews and other interruptions previously. Thus, you may want to consider a minimum threshold of a full business day. A single hour one on one still allows a team member to complete a task on that same day. Contrarily, a full day off-site “all hands” meeting does not permit any “real” work to get accomplished on the day the meeting is scheduled. Thus, creating a break in the work all team members are performing on that specific “all hands” meeting day reflects the real world impact of such events on your team’s estimates and work delivery. Once added, all work delivery end dates should be pushed out a full day. In my experience, when estimating work, technical people rarely think through the impact of such business event. They don’t always realize the need to incorporate these events into their work delivery communications and expectations setting.

Vacations

Adding team member vacations is extremely helpful from multiple perspectives. For one, it is a great single place for you to keep that information. Your company may already have an HR administrative system that automates the process of keeping track of this information thus this benefit might be marginalized. But if you aren’t fortunate to have such a system, it can become a real hassle maintaining and updating a spreadsheet to track this information yourself. By incorporating this administrivia into your Gantt chart, keeping track becomes just another step in the process of keeping the chart data updated through team one on one discussions, etc. For our planning effort, the lager benefit for tracking such information is in the improved accuracy of establishing work request delivery end dates. If another 40 hours is needed for a team member to complete a specific work request but that team member is going to be out on vacation for the next five days, clearly that work request isn’t going to get completed for at least two weeks. By adding that team member’s five day vacation as a break in their work on that request, the new work delivery date now is more realistic. With this vacation break clearly noted in your chart, external parties have a clearer picture on what is making the request take, in this case, at least two weeks minimum instead of expecting the request to be completed next Friday.

In summary, consider a threshold of a day for HR-ish work events and the following activities to be worthy of explicit Gantt chart reporting as material breaks to in-flight work:

• Vacations
• “All hands” meetings
• Off-site meetings (even if they are half days, consider the travel, etc.)
• Training sessions (full day and/or off-site)
• Sick days

Recording sick days can be really handy when a team member misses a few days of work and the ability for them to still complete their work request on the originally estimated completion date is infeasible. Additionally, as the weeks go by it becomes increasingly difficult to remember such loss of work days occurring in the past. This data can be critical to have captured and clearly reported on over time when the delivery date is fast approaching and requestors are starting to challenge the status of the work request progress or perceived lack of progress.

Special Assignments

Another body of work that deserves reporting recognition is the special assignment. From the typical situation:

Manager: Hey, can you look into what systems will be impacted when we start the FlimFlam upgrade project and let me know by next Friday before the quarterly project review meeting?

Team Member: Sure.

You asked that team member to do that work because it is important for your meeting. Now adding that request as a new single Gantt row of work accomplishes a number of goals:

• Records the request so both you and the team member know it was made and when it is due.
• Reflects that request along side the other work that team member is actively working on.
• Communicates to other team members what each other are working on beyond just formal request and project work.
• Communicates to outside parties all the work required by your team to perform the services they are charged with beyond just the formal request and project work.

In the act of recording the request you might (hypothetically) notice that the team member has a critical work deliverable due that same Friday. You have the opportunity to follow-up with that team member to remind them of their deliverable due dates, reset priorities or re-assign the request to another team member.

Again, you will need to develop your effective level of detail in reporting these non-external work requests. Your goal should be to strike a balance between overly detailed and thus time consuming to track compared to too little detail and thus requests get missed or lack external visibility.

On Going Assignments

You may want to consider adding on going assignments that don’t have a true end date to your report as well. An example might be investigating a new technology in order to consider its use in solving a formal work request in the future. I would suggest you put them at the very bottom of your report since they won’t change frequently. You may want to consider coming up with a unique color for these never ending requests. Since the time applied to these assignments varies, I wouldn’t try and update any work estimate durations around them unless you really want to enforce a team goal. A goal such as “spend 10% of your time investigating new technologies” should involve the reduction in about a half a day per week applied to all work estimates. This overall reduction formally allocates time for all to accomplish this goal from a work estimation perspective. Motivating your team members to meet their pressing external work deliverable dates plus invest time in learning new technologies at the same time is another matter.

At this point, you should have an even more accurate team resource plan reflected in your Gantt chart including all the major external and internal work items your team is engaged on. In the next article, I’ll suggest ways to keep the report from going stale and examples of the power of your resource plan possesses in improving how your are perceived as a manager in your organization.

Build out that Gantt chart

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we put together an initial Gantt chart that lists all the work requests and projects by work phase and indicated which team member is work on which phase. Additionally, your team review of the chart increased its accuracy and improved your team’s level of engagement. This article will build on that initial chart and incorporate work estimation sheets as well as additional work considerations.

Merge Gantt with Work Estimations

Now that you have a list of all work requests and projects with resources assigned by phases plus a quick team review, now is a good time to take all those work estimation sheets and pull the data and plug the data into the Gantt chart. But first, we need to make a few decisions around how to account for time in the day.

If you are using a Gantt charting tool that has an option for defining the work hours in a day, you will need to determine the total number of hours that reflect a true workday for your work requests and projects. As I’ve covered before in part three, realistically, an engineer doesn’t have a full eight hours in a day to dedicate exclusively to project and work requests. With team meetings, HR activities like performance reviews, 1:1’s, training, holidays, time off, etc., your real working hours in a given day maybe more like five of six rather than eight.

If you re using my work estimation template I referred to in part seven of this series, then that template has the ability to incorporate a calculation to handle the real working hours in an average workday. More specifically, the total hour calculations are raw hours where as the “duration” or “contiguous work days” calculations are where the real working hours calculations come into effect. Make sure you are clear on how you are entering your hours for estimating phase durations to make sure you aren’t over or under calculating the length of the durations.

Linking or Sequencing Work Phases

After taking a brief pause and stretching from the cramping associated with all of the data entry you have just completed, now it is time to link or sequence the work phases. Depending on the Gantt chart tool you are using, there should be a way to link the work phases you entered to reflect the workflow over time. Using our example from the previous article, the sequence should reflect that work requests get completed in the following sequence:

Planning -> Design -> Development -> Testing -> Deployment -> Post-Deployment

Below is an example from Microsoft Project that shows this example from above:

Your Gantt chart tool should have some way to indicate that although both tasks can start after the “Design” phase is complete, (hypothetically for example purposes), the Biz development can’t start until a certain milestone is reached in the UI development. Similarly, “Testing” can’t start until both Biz and UI development is completed. In this more complex example, UI is estimated to take a few days more than Biz even though UI started before Biz:

Pause and Admire Your Work

Before you start analyzing the results, first, step back and look at your first draft team resource plan in Gantt chart form. I think you will agree that you now have a single, professional and authoritative report of what your team is currently engaged on work request and project-wise.

Back to Work, Sanity Checking the Chart

Enough basking in your resource management reporting superiority; now it is time to sanity check your chart. Beyond merely double checking that all your “Testing” phases currently appear after any and all “Development” phases, look for these specific abnormalities and take some action on them to improve the quality and accuracy of your chart:

1. Do any of the same resources appear to be working on phases at the same time as phases in another work request or project?

If the answer is “yes” then don’t panic; this might not be wrong. It may reflect a resource winding down on one request and getting started on the next. But, if you have allocated a full “day” on request A and another full “day” on request B with one starting/stopping, you need to be sure that that indeed is the message you want to externally communicate. Please recall that the real goal of this Gantt chart is to “report” to external parties what you want them to see and understand about your team’s work. Thus, if you have been requested to work on two requests concurrently and the skill set needed to complete these two requests is contained within only one team member, then the overlap your report is showing is accurate. It maybe accurate but it might not be realistically achievable. There will be more on how to use this report to assist with rectifying this situation later.

1. Do any resources appear to have large gaps of unassigned work requests?

If the answer is “yes” make sure you have entered all the estimation data correctly and verified your start and end dates. This may not be an error. Rather, this may indicate that a particular resource doesn’t have any formal project of request work to handle during that gap.

Sanity Checking the Chart with your Team

Similar to the previous article, this is another great opportunity to get feedback from your team. As I mentioned prior, in addition to increasing the quality of your chart, you will enjoy the side benefits of over all increased team engagement. If your team is highly technical, asking for feedback might not immediately resonate with them on how this helps them. If you simply ask:

Manager: Does this look right?

Highly Technically Focused Team Member: Yah, sure.

You may need to pull information out of them through more probing questions or consider challenging them on specific data in the report that looks a bit suspicious. Consider:

Manager: Does this look right?

Same Team Member: Yah, sure.

Manager: Ok, it looks like you are working on request 7648 and 7653 at the same time and from your estimates, it looks like both will be done next Friday.

Same Team Member: I can’t do them both at the same time.

Manager: Ok, which one makes sense to work on before the other?

Same Team Member: Oh, I have to do 7653 first since I’ll tweak the solution from 7653 to complete 7648.

Manager: So you need to work on 7653 first, exclusively, and then you can begin work on 7648?

Same Team Member: Yes.

Manager: Great, I‘ll adjust the chart to show that.

Based on the above exchange, adjusting the chart to show request 7653 starting and then ending before 7648 will now more accurately communicate what this team member is working on when and at what date specific work items are estimated to be completed. Additionally, you can note the technical dependency the one request has on the other in order to communicate that externally to interested parties. Lastly, the team member now leaves that conversation with a sense that the boss cares to an increased degree what he or she is working on. Hence another additional up tick in engagement from that team member.

At this point, you should have a rather accurate, through team review, Gantt chart reflecting all the major external work items your team is engaged on. In the next article, I’ll suggest ways to include internal work items like vacations and special assignments that involve your team’s time with considerations on how to reflect that work in amongst the external work in flight to give a even more complete view of your team’s work.