News – Trang 13 – PMI Vietnam Chapter

09/03/202109/03/2021

Project vs Product teams

A popular way to initiate a new team to solve specific problems/ deliver specific scope is by funding a new project. The project team then exists for a limited period until reaching the goals defined in the business case. On the other hand, the product team is usually durable (exist several years) and take ownership of a product. It is not strictly constrained in a specific problem/ scope but is more open to adapt to news, changes from customers or the product context.

A clear cut to explicitly label a team is project or product team is not important. A team can start as a project at first then transform into a product team to take ownership of the newly built product. Or a product team can also experience project delivery to tackle specific problems at certain times. Some key considerations to structure a team are:

Delivering outcomes/ solving root problems for stakeholders is the purpose/ mission of the team. Not simply building a function or defined scope. Sometimes, a team might stick to defined output but forgetting why that output is needed.
“The Pool Model” with engineers are fully utilized from project to project could be a myth. Careful attention is needed to distinguish between hours optimization vs value optimization. It takes time for the team to deeply engage with the problem domain and understand customers’ needs. Then, the team can achieve valuable outcomes with customers.
Context switching should be minimized to help members stay productive. It’s not only about the domain knowledge, system familiarity but also about people relationships. It takes time for members to get to know each other and form a cohesive team.

What are your thoughts on structuring teams around products, projects, or functions?

09/02/202109/02/2021

Meetings That Don’t Suck

Meeting is a part of our daily job as PM, sometimes it’s the biggest part of the day. However, people have reasons to claim that meetings are the least productive part of the day. How can we get the most out of valuable meetings. Here are some thoughts:

Kill the status meeting

We all know how expensive a long status meeting with a wide audience is. The wasteful part of it should be replaced by an Information Radiator where anyone can pull the necessary updates on a regular basis. I personally still support status meetings just to focus on the important topics (sometimes required the wide audience’s attention). Then, the outcome of the meetings should be reflected to a public Information Radiator as well.

One-on-one meetings are important

This is the crucial moment to enhance relationships, surface hidden problems, align on vision with your direct reports, designer, engineering leads, etc. It should be immovable or equally important with other meetings. It helps us to learn about our people, listen to them and show that we care.

Well organized

Of course, all meetings should have an owner, agenda ahead of time with sufficient audience. So, people can be prepared, arrange representatives, provide needed inputs or even the answer to make the meeting not necessary anymore. That helps to save time, effort and people can stay productive.

A busy calendar doesn’t make us important

We might have the feeling of importance with a full calendar or even double, triple booked. However, it might be a sign of ineffectiveness or changes should happen. We all need to have spaces for ad-hoc, unexpected stuff or just for others to reach us. PMs should also have time to focus or just breath and think about important things to do.

Calendar bankruptcy

This is a very interesting concept to clear everything and start over again. All the debts or unnecessary meetings will be automatically removed and important meetings will be rebooked again. Some startups choose to do this by Jan 1st – the beginning of the year to remove all of the scheduled and repeated meetings. Then, people need to rethink whether it’s worth investing people’s time or any wastes can be eliminated. It saves tons of effort and productive hours for companies.

Do you have another tip to keep meetings productive?

08/31/202108/31/2021

Are you making things that People Want?

Each project/ team has their own mission to build up things or deliver value to related stakeholders. The end result is stakeholders get a better solution to do their work or solve their own problems. In the “Making things people want” blog, Des Traynor proves how problems people face rarely change, and focusing on the unchanged leads us to better outcomes.

How to find out what people want:

1. Care & understand the longstanding human or business needs. That sets the outcome people wants. It could be travelling without hassle or buying things with a frictionless journey.
2. Care & understand how people are currently achieving that outcome, might be through some alternative ways.

How to make things people want:

1. Improve upon the existing solutions. Is it easier to do financial services with a modern digital wallet than a traditional bank?
2. Make it possible for more people. Can e-commerce allow more people to sell stuff with a much lower entry barrier?
3. Make it possible in more situations. Social media let people be entertained in a relatively short period like when on a train or even an elevator.

Any other way to make things that people want in your project/ team?

08/30/202103/19/2023

Project management skills to Adapt to Changes

The Covid pandemic has completely shifted the way people working with each other. Gathering up in a room to focus on a meeting topic is not that easy anymore. The new conditions also require project managers’ adaptability to stay effective with the changing environments.

Major changes in PM skills to adapt to the New Normal:

1. Asynchronous vs Synchronous communication: Communication is still crucial for all projects. The principle to keep a common forum for team collaboration while protecting focus time for members to be productive is unchanged. The changes are around how we keep the information flow remotely in an efficient manner. Everyone should be aware that synchronous meetings with all members are even more expensive than before. Async communication should be utilized more for regular discussion. A variety of tools like Slack, MS Teams can support the changes & the Team should also adopt them in the evolving way of working.
2. Single source of truth and Clarity: It’s becoming more important than ever before to maintain the single source of truth, or people will become frustrated with ambiguity and communication overhead. The team’s tools and methodology should allow people to easily pull their needed resources/ data to perform their owned works. It is also easier for all stakeholders to be aware of the big picture – how all activities are integrating to deliver expected outcomes.
3. Project Management is everyone’s responsibility: Self-organizing and ownership habits are the keys to success as a team. There might be tons of unknowns for a single project manager but it should not prevent the collective success of the team with cross-function skills. People who are closest to the work should know the most and be in a better position to manage the work delivery.
4. Empathy: we are all human beings and understand how this challenging circumstance influences everyone’s life. The project manager should always cultivate the psychological safety for the team, & enable people to share ideas even strange ones. As we are all in an abnormal situation, reaching out to members, identifying problems and finding out suitable solutions together requires special care from project managers.

What is the biggest change in your opinion for PM skill in the New Normal?

Reference: new-rules-of-project-management, CIO.com

08/29/202108/30/2021

Considerations for Enterprise Agile Frameworks

If you are considering frameworks that help to scale agile product development across multiple teams, the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Enterprise Agile Frameworks might help your thinking process. “This Market Guide provides a snapshot of this evolving market and insight into differences among enterprise agile frameworks.”

Keynotes:

The popularity of a given enterprise agile framework does not ensure it will suit your organization.
Organization’s culture, maturity and stakeholder needs should be taken into account for considerations.
External consultants cannot replace (can only augment) in-house agile team expertise.
No framework by itself can do the heavy lifting of culture change.
Scaling to enterprise agile will not only transform software development, but it will also transform the role software development plays in the organization.
Customized Scrum of Scrums has emerged as a leading “framework”.

What is your thought on Enterprise Agile Frameworks?

08/29/202108/30/2021

Hypothesis validation in value delivery journey

One of the wisdom I keep reminding myself is “what is the root problem/ true need I & my team want to address for the customers” before making any decision. Hypothesis validation is an essential activity that helps us to discover the real end-user need. It can be a desire that needs to be satisfied or a pain point that needs to be solved. Then, it should be the area where the team should focus on instead of wasting time to address unreal problems.

In the “Develop a Hypothesis Before a Solution” – Projectmanagement.com blog post, Bart Gerardi has shared his own story regard shipping a feature without a tested hypothesis would add zero value to the customers. In the specific example, the customer journey can even become worse when an unreal problem was being “fixed”.

Why we need hypothesis validation:

1. It helps all members to focus on the end goal that the team is approaching with its customers. It can be a set of features to satisfy specific customers’ needs or make life easier with a frictionless experience.
2. It saves costs by not wasting resources/ energy on the wrong problems and lower priority ones. Spending a little effort upfront to discover real and unreal problems to be solved can save tons of effort to build a wrong solution later.
3. It increases members’ engagement and collaboration to figure out the right things to do together. Self-organization is also cultivated as each individual is aware of their responsibility to value contribution.

How to start using hypothesis validation:

We can simply start with asking more “why” questions before investing team effort to develop a new feature. Another way, we can start thinking from the expected result and open the dialogue to discuss whether it’s worth pursuing and what is the quickest way to validate that assumption. Then, based on the new info from the 1st test, the team can iterate the assumptions and learn what is truly valuable to their customers. That keeps the team moving forward on the right track.

More guidance can be found at:

hypothesis-driven-validation, Hilary Hayes

practice_run_user_experiments, Rick Goldberg

hypothesis-driven-development, Dmytro Domashenko

Are you spending/ or going to spend team effort to test hypothesises besides development?

08/28/202102/15/2023

Problem Solving with Visualization

Problem-solving is part of PM’s daily works. Problems can come from a variety of sources and relate to multiple parts of the system or organization. Sometimes, it can be tough to align with different stakeholders on a root problem and needed actions. Visualization comes to the place to foster collaboration and clarity for the team to agree on wise actions for the right problem.

Benefits of visualization:

1. Help in the thought process as when we try to visualize the problem, we need to review the whole flow & double down on the details at the same time. It requires us to understand more clearly in order to compose the visualization.
2. In addition, teammates can easily refer/ zoom in a specific area to discuss => Which fosters collaboration & allow people to identify all relations, sequences, connections in the same way. Misunderstandings can be easily surfaced & the team gain alignment and consensus on thinking process.
3. Retain the knowledge/ key points as a map to approach step by step. aha moment from current state to the desired state

How to start using Visualization techniques:

It does not require a fancy tool. We just need a whiteboard or pencil and paper to capture the thought process and validate with more tangible materials. The team can collectively build up initial understandings about the problem in the 1st place. Then, continuously adjusting based on stakeholders’ feedback or new information arises. We also need to care about the related audiences and background context to put into the big picture.

The measure of success is not having an aesthetic picture. The main purpose of this exercise is better communication and collaboration with teammates, stakeholders to solve the right problem at a time. That helps the team to move forward.

What is your opinion/ practical experience in problem-solving with visualization?

Reference: official-pmi-blog/the-power-of-visualization-to-solve-problems/