[Project Management]
Tags: #management #process #project #pm
Project Management.md
[!TIP] See also https://gist.github.com/Integralist/bfcad74c66dfa1e8eb5e2c07b13811df
What Who How Why?
- Product Manager: owns the story of “what”
- Engineering Manager: owns the story of “who”
- Engineering Lead (Tech Lead): owns the story of “how”
- All Three: each person shares ownership of the story of “why”
Project Management
- š¤ Understand the requirements, and specifically why they are important.
- š Create simple/high-level Gherkin user stories to help understand the product values and standards.
- ā
Break down the requirements into milestones and manageable sub tasks
- inc. investigation time, QA (Quality Assurance) and security testing
- š Prioritise tasks
- e.g. either by ‘importance/impact’ (High, Medium, Low) or using ‘MSC’ (Must Should Could)
- Once categorized, group related items (e.g. group together all high, medium, low items)
- A table matrix can help visualise the various tasks and their importance
- š Work through the unknowns until you really feel that there is no more value to be gained in spending time on them.
- š£ Figure out who and which teams need to be consulted, and communicate as often as practical.
- š Run the project and adjust the plan as you go.
- How far has the project has come?
- How far is it from completion?
- š Track changes to requirements and be clear about the cost of those changes
- How do they affect the completion?
- Should we cut some existing features in order to accommodate the new work?
- š Ensure observability and monitoring is in place.
- ā Define a rollout plan and what the roll back steps look like.
- What systems need to be integrated with?
- Notify appropriate on-call and support teams
- ā¤ļø Retro
- What went well, what didn’t, what could we do differently in future?
- š CELEBRATE!
User Stories
Gherkin is plain-text with a little extra structure and is designed to be easy to learn by non-programmers, yet structured enough to allow concise description of examples to illustrate business rules in most real-world domains. – https://cucumber.io/docs/reference
It’s good for documentation and it can be helpful to some teams to use these user stories as a foundation for their own integration testing systems (although I personally wouldn’t, I prefer just using them as a simple reference for what it is we want to achieve at a high-level).
Feature: User Authentication
...optional description about this feature here...
Scenario: authenticated user requesting a page
Given I am a BuzzFeed user (internal or external)
And Iām already signed in
When I visit www.buzzfeed.com or www.buzzfeed.com/post
Then I am directed to my destination page
Scenario: unauthenticated user requesting a page
Given I am a BuzzFeed user (internal or external)
And Iām not signed in
When I visit www.buzzfeed.com or www.buzzfeed.com/post
Then I am able to login with <method>
Examples:
| method |
| Facebook |
| Twitter |
| Google |
| Username/Password |
Scenario: unauthenticated user successful login
Given I am a BuzzFeed user (internal or external)
And I provide valid credentials
When I attempt to login
Then I am directed to my destination page
Scenario: unauthenticated user failed login
Given I am a BuzzFeed user (internal or external)
And I provide invalid credentials
When I attempt to login
Then I am presented with a login error
Scenario: unauthenticated user sign-up
Given I am a BuzzFeed user (internal or external)
And I am not already registered in the system
When I visit www.buzzfeed.com/cms
Then I am directed to a legacy sign-up flow
Positive Mindset
I’ve found that swapping the word “problem” for “challenge” a good thing to do in general, whether it be talking about an actual technical challenge or discussing a challenging interaction with another employee. The subtle switch in language helps me refocus on a more positive and motivated projectory (rather than setting myself up to be in a negative mindset for the conversation).
Recognising Trends
It can be useful, when reporting to your line manager (e.g. 1:1’s where you discuss things that are on your mind), it can be difficult sometimes to voice concerns without explicit examples.
Depending on the situation, explicit examples aren’t always possible to recall. In those cases where you have a niggling feeling something isn’t quite right but you couldn’t point to an exact point in time where an incident occurred, then being able to see a trend of something negative happening can help you to raise it up to leadership.
Be aware of trends in people, otherwise you might find yourself in a bad situation and not sure how or why you got there in the first place. Not everything is so ‘black and white’ and obvious.