Who moved the project time?

Today, I suddenly found that the project has been spending nearly 70% of the time, and it seems that it is still far away from the end of coding. In the face of the leaders' questioning eyes and the confused eyes of the team members, I took a deep breath, and my brain started to run at high speed. Who moved the project time?

Project Status

First, we will introduce the general situation of the project:

In fact, the project is not very complex. It is a system that processes business processes. The project was received at the end of June July. The customer wanted to see it in June middle August due to the fact that the leaders had negotiated with the customer, so they were very nervous. Taking into account the tight schedule, the project began in a hurry. Three people were originally planned, but considering the time was too urgent, three more people were added. In the process of writing SRS, there was a message from the client, and deadline was not so tight. In this way, our nervous system was relaxed, and this loose caused a problem, we have never been determined by the customer for some uncertain requirements. During this period, I have to understand SRS as much as possible, and schedule the tasks in the design phase. The subsequent work also basically overlapped. the design work was started without a clear understanding of the requirements. When the design was not completely completed, the coding started again. After coding, SRS does not actually have release, and milestone does not. But we can't keep waiting. The code is carried out step by step. Suddenly, I found that time is not enough ......

Next, I will analyze from several aspects why I am not enough time and where have they been?

Schedule

In the previous arrangement, my plan was very rough, because the time was too short, and the plan was basically mission impossible. After learning about the loose time, I made appropriate adjustments to the plan. I personally think it is reasonable, but the implementation of the plan is not as perfect as the plan.

The unclear requirements lead to the completion of the document, which may lead to a delay of a lot of time. As a result, I will definitely not be able to do so, so I started the design work. In the design process, we design and wait for the customer's message, but after a long time, the customer feedback we finally waited for was not returned. This strengthened our ideas and began to work hard. At this time, the progress of the project has been significantly different from my plan. The design period was originally one week and it took two and a half weeks. Although after the preliminary draft of the design document is completed and discussed, I have arranged some coding work because I don't want to waste time and people are idle, but this part of work also took a lot of time, so that the quality of the design did not reach the expected effect.

Of course, the old saying goes that the plan will never catch up with changes. Even if the plan is good, something will always happen in the implementation process to make your plan meaningless. Besides, who can make the plan so seamless. In my understanding, only a rough plan is needed for the plan, that is, the major stages, how long each stage will take, and how many people will be needed, at the beginning of the project, it is totally nonsense to develop a plan that is accurate to every person every day.

One thing I feel about a plan is that it is difficult to make a plan. Because software development is not like other plans, all the steps are determined in advance, you do not need to do some creative development. Software development is a creative work of a project. As a project manager, you need to plan the development team members every week or even every day. Such tasks are divided according to the specific circumstances of the project, in addition, our project is small in size and there are no full-time designers. Every member is involved in the design, but one problem is that the Members are new users, the technology used is unfamiliar, which will inevitably affect the efficiency of task execution.

Customer Relationship

Customer relationship is a very important issue. This project is a bit like a traditional project development. When determining the project, the customer sent a request, and then wrote the requirement document as needed, and then sent it to the customer, hoping to return some feedback. However, the actual situation is that there is no feedback after the document is sent. At the beginning, we only had a telephone meeting with the customer and asked for unclear requirements.

However, as the project progresses, more unclear requirements are displayed in front of us. In the future, we have never communicated with customers, not only the interface, but also the requirements, I don't know whether the customer is satisfied. Now, I can only wait for the test to be delivered to the customer to see how satisfied the customer is.

There is really little communication with the customer. What is the result? It will only be known after the project is over.

Resource management

In this project, resources are mainly time computing for me. The proportion of each member's input to the project is determined in advance. For example, if you only work in this project, that is, 100%, if there are other projects at the same time, it may be that 50% of the time is spent on this project. After the project started, I made a mistake, that is, when calculating the time, basically according to the actual work, for example, if a project member of 100% spent only four hours on the project today, I calculated it for only four hours. In fact, it should be the time for statistics of 100%. After learning about this error, I found that it took nearly half of the time to start encoding.

To solve this problem, the perfect solution is to ensure that Members are fully protected every day. In this way, the project manager will not worry about unnecessary time consumption, but will be satisfied with the project's non-growth progress. However, this is, after all, only an illusion that cannot be achieved. But how to arrange the work of each member more efficiently is linked with the task plan mentioned above. This problem still needs to be learned.

Communication

Communication problems here refer to communication between members. This problem was particularly evident in the early stage of the project. all the team members were more involved in requirement analysis and design work with our project manager, as a result, I am working as a hub for transmitting information. The unclear requirements make me very difficult, and sometimes the results I have mentioned are inconsistent. In order to solve the problem, I specially assigned some work to two people, but the effect is still not much changed. Communication between the two people is still not enough. In the middle and late stages of the design and coding, this situation has changed, because at this time, you must contact others to communicate with each other in order to continue your work.

 

In the later stages of communication, we often encounter situations where we do not have a clear understanding of the requirements, and we need to talk about the document. I think there are two main roles in project documents. One is the process of writing documents as a process of thinking, which can help us think as much as possible; the other is communication, this document helps you understand what you need. However, not everyone will carefully read dozens of pages of documents. It is difficult for the team members to clearly understand their needs and follow-up documents.

Risk Control

In the progress of the project, the risk management is still done. Check the current risk situation every week and check whether there is a need for increase or decrease. However, in actual implementation, there are some forms. First, it is not difficult to define the project's risk items. Some risks are always defined, but how to avoid them is very difficult to implement after they happen. In the current organizational structure, sometimes risks cannot be handled even if they are discovered or even occurred.