Let's face it - stuff breaks. Entropy and Murphy's Law apply to the virtual world just as they do to the physical world. It doesn't matter if there is an elegant piece of code wrapped up with clear naming conventions, adhering to standards and optimized for performance running on a shiny server hosted to the world, eventually it is going to fail due to a variety of factors including add-ons, installs, part failure, outages and upgrades to products, operating systems, browsers and equipment for all hardware and IP assets. It's part of life for software and IT professionals.
Staying on top of of the changes and testing on development platforms will reduce the number of customer service calls later, but managing for the volume of action steps that must occur in sequenced order causes a priority scramble and hectic, triage mentality. Priorities are often addressed by putting out the biggest fires first - often at the expense of other tasks postponed that may be critical to other team members. The result is a tense workplace filled with low morale with accusations based on assumptions.
Our case study is NSP Lab Services who needed a way to manage all of their shared action steps and priorities running test automation on many products and platforms simultaneously. Their business model depends on providing their clients with a clear ROI proving their efficiency in regression test scripts run by their engineering staff. They selected PlanDone to track the progress of the scripts through the automated testing cycle as a value added tool and to improve communication as sub-teams phased in and out.
To complete projects and tasks on time with an online, collaboration plan, software and IT professionals should:
1. Document Upfront - Immediately document the objectives, management approach, scope, deliverables, estimated hours, cost, and milestones.
2. Spotlight Speedbumps - Proactively assess the risks, assumptions, issues, definitions with short and long term goals with measurement for success.
3. Leadership Hand-off - Get executive planning buy-in and sign-off to delegate the execution to the task teams.
4. Listen and Be Heard - Encourage and capture input of all executives, managers, operations, engineers, and support staff as innovative ideas come from all levels of organizations building trust and confidence in an open system.
5. Divide and Conquer - Task teams break projects down into smaller tasks with action steps that can be shared with and delegated to other team members rolled up into priority lists to point teams in the right direction.
6. Don't Re-Invent the Wheel - For similar tasks with similar steps to completion use an copy step from import feature to reduce redundant data entry.
7. First Things First - For many action steps associated with many tasks and many projects a priority ranking system is created based on days to deadline and severity level to keep staff focused on the highest priority right now.
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