Mantra for Entrepreneurial Project Management

Mangesh SardesaiConsultantSiemens Technology and Services Private Limited

Title: Becoming the preferred partner…Theme: Mantra for Entrepreneurial Project Management

Abstract

Challenge: The project is executed in support mode - tasks are assigned after detailed analysis by the

partner. The offshore team needs to increase its involvement through-out the software development life-

cycle.

Proposed solution: Increase ownership by collaboration, higher productivity, enhancing knowledge and

delivering higher quality.

Analyzing project artifacts and partner feedback identified following action areas:

1. Communication – Increase trust by conveying information to the right stakeholders at the right

time.

2. Status reporting – Push data for better informed and proactive decisions.

3. Risk management – Document risks identified and share risk-plan regularly.

4. Predictability – Share tracked and closed issues to ensure timely deliveries.

5. Scope management – Allows better decision-making and responsibility sharing.

6. Testing – Strategize so that testing is flexible and adaptive to un-planned changes made in the

software.

7. Stakeholder Management – Delegate personnel as part of the onsite team.

8. Resource optimization:

Unify resources across sub-teams for cost advantages.

Increase use of virtualization.

An action plan based on above points was shared and tracked - The activity was lauded by the partners

and they sought greater engagement at all levels of the project.

This is just the beginning. Newer and greater challenges lie ahead.

1. Buffer management – Estimates must be pragmatic.

2. Testing automation – Increase productivity and control risk

3. Put yourselves in the partners’ shoes – Align with the objectives

4. Knowledge sharing – Core team must focus on domain and learning from customer support team,

competitors etc.

All this boosts confidence in the team and partners as we progress!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction.................................................................................................................................................. 2

Solution approach........................................................................................................................................ 3

Communication........................................................................................................................................ 3

Status reporting....................................................................................................................................... 4

Risk management.................................................................................................................................... 5

Predictability............................................................................................................................................ 5

Scope management................................................................................................................................. 5

Testing..................................................................................................................................................... 6

Stakeholder Management........................................................................................................................ 7

Resource optimization............................................................................................................................. 7

Challenges................................................................................................................................................... 7

Results......................................................................................................................................................... 8

Technical................................................................................................................................................. 8

Productivity.............................................................................................................................................. 8

Partner feedback..................................................................................................................................... 8

More off-shoring....................................................................................................................................... 9

Attrition.................................................................................................................................................... 9

Conclusion................................................................................................................................................... 9

List of figures

Figure 1: Communication paths...................................................................................................................3

Figure 2: Stakeholder management by delegation......................................................................................6

Figure 3: Partner feedback.......................................................................................................................... 8

Introduction

The project is a legacy application that is in the market for more than 15 years. It has an established and

large customer base. Given this history, it is understandable that the partner has some hesitation towards

off-shoring. However, with increasing saturation in the developed countries, upcoming opportunities in the

BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and other Asian countries provide strategic support to off-shoring

because of closeness to the emerging market.

This paper provides a case study of the changes implemented in an off-shored project with a view to

become the preferred partner. It highlights the challenges in implementation and ways in which they were

effectively addressed.

Solution approach

This process involved 3 basic steps to begin with:

1. Focus on the problems to be solved

2. Come up with approaches that are effective and acceptable within the project constraints

3. Applying past learning to the selected problem solution(s) and see whether the desired results will

be achieved

This brought the following areas into focus:

Communication

Software is all about design and learning. Design and learning are collaboration efforts. Good

communication makes collaboration more effective. The major cost of lack of collaboration is –

rework.

Accordingly, an elaborate communication protocol was setup. This included well defined

communication channels shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Communication paths

Information sharing rather than just status reporting became the main objective. So meetings

were planned with the partners after activities that were most likely to change the project status

i.e.

Technical meetings with the software architect that could cause changes in priorities or

newer tasks

Project stakeholder meetings that could change the higher level objectives of the project

especially around important milestones

Accordingly the frequency of meetings with the partners was set to twice a week.

This ensured that by conveying information to the right stakeholders (technical as well as project

management) at the right time, trust could be increased - because the change in priorities and

subsequent re-planning was transparent.

Status reporting

In continuation to the previous point, elaborate information templates were devised - containing type

of information to be pushed depending on the meeting

Technical information included completed tasks, challenges faced and overcome, unsolved

issues with possible solutions, learnings while implementing certain tasks and areas where

further progress was blocked.

Project information like availability, upcoming bottlenecks, risks, important reminders for

action items tailored to the various project phases

This ensured that the relevant data was always at hand when the time came for making decisions

and increased productivity by reducing the time required for preparing for meetings. Also, this led to a

certain expected predictability about the outcome of such meetings - people started looking forward to

such meetings.

This ensured that correct data was pushed for better informed and proactive decisions.

Risk management

Risks identified were documented and the risk-plan was also shared with the partners regularly during

project status meetings. Risks were tracked and probability as well as risk exposure were updated

and communicated to all stakeholders.

Predictability

Even issues encountered and resolved were tracked, closed and then shared with the partners. This

allowed the partners to see the efforts made to ensure timely deliveries even in cases where issues

could have caused delays. This in turn increased faith in the partners that the deliveries were

predictable – the offshore team always stuck to the planned delivery schedule.

Points 3 and 4 bring a lot of advantages:

Partners can see the challenges foreseen as well as faced and approaches taken to

overcome them

The realization that although the goals are same, problems faced might be different (or the

solutions)

Partners might be able to help out in areas that they are familiar with

If not, it is fun to solve such things together - it reinforces the feeling that we are in it together

Scope management

Scope was defined in terms of activities to be carried out, their priorities and then who is best

positioned to handle the activities. For example, certification and audit activities were off-shored as

the relevant authorities were co-located.

This was possible because the offshore team demonstrated that they could:

Collaborate well with other offshore teams that had undergone certification so that so that

certification challenges were identified before-hand and addressed

Proposal to use multiple environments to speed up troubleshooting, parallelize execution

and risk mitigation for the issues identified during the certification testing

Feedback on implemented features was scoped to the partners as they were closer to the established

markets.

This built up confidence that certain areas would be the strengths of the offshore team and in other

areas the onsite team was the eyes and ears of the combined team. This appealed a lot to the onsite

team - they were culturally happy with well-defined activities. On the other hand, the offshore team

enjoyed working on and learning from newer areas of the project execution. This led to increased

domain know-how and left the onsite team free to focus on the existing customer base with whom

they have forged strong relationships. This was a win-win situation for both teams.

Testing

The product testing activities were already off-shored completely. The challenge was to increase the

productivity and optimize the testing effort. There were many aspects to this approach:

Involve the test team in unit testing so that they could add value to the development effort

earlier on in the project lifecycle

Prioritize and optimize between unit testing and product testing

Repeatable tests i.e. regression tests were structured in such a way that technical

documentation authors and developers could also run them to learn more about the existing

features. This helped them ramp-up on areas of the application that were new to them. It also

allowed them to aid in the testing effort whenever required.

Involve PDM in test design reviews so that all would be in agreement as to the expected

results during the course of the sprints.

This allowed involved strategizing so that testing became flexible and adaptive to un-planned

changes made in the software.

Stakeholder Management

As part of increasing the stakeholder engagement, the idea was to delegate experienced personnel

as part of the onsite team. It was planned and executed as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Stakeholder management by delegation

This increased trust because the onsite team worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the delegated

personnel. The delegated personnel could understand why and how the partners functioned in a

certain way that was different from the way in which the offsite team functioned. This enabled the

offsite team to leverage the best of both methods and work more effectively.

Resource optimization

Unify resources across sub-teams for cost advantages: This point was drafted keeping in

mind the fact that a bigger project team can pool its resources as opposed to multiple smaller

teams. The resource usage could then be optimized because the sub-project milestones

were generally staggered based on their involvement in the system being developed.

Increase use of virtualization: This helped a lot in the testing arena. Testers could prepare

Virtual Machine images in advance based on the various topologies and Operating Systems

on which the product had to be tested. Based on the priorities of the deployment topology and

the Operating Systems, priority environments could be verified first before moving on to

lesser priority environments. It also helped a lot in having multiple environments to reproduce

issues that were Operating System specific – allowing faster turnaround of annoying issues

arising from different behavior of the Operating Systems.

Challenges

Following points were identified as the challenges:

1. Difference in the maturity of the developer community and the fact that we provide an

‘Engineering Solution’ and not just software

2. Mismatch in the age and working culture of the teams

3. Forge a relationship based on trust, knowledge transfer, delivering the goods and eventually take

up ownership

Both teams were sensitized about this at kick-off and any challenges that might actualize were monitored

and tracked.

With support from management and both teams being open to trying out the proposed solution, none of

the foreseen challenges actualized.

Results

Technical Technical meetings were hailed as a best practice by partners

Domain knowledge increased and this was evident from the fact that in the next release

many critical features were off-shored for analysis and implementation

Even after bringing in the process changes and a project structure change, the team

delivered all the planned features with good quality

Productivity

The offshore team was able to implement 3 new features in addition to the planned count of 4 taking

the total features delivered to 7. Not only this, the team was also able to automate an in-house

developed simulator for testing. The resulting solution was so streamlined that end-customer demos

were provided using this automation package – with zero defects reported from the field.

Partner feedback

The partners were very satisfied with the results of the project management changes brought in. This

was evident from the ratings received from the partners. The feedback was the best overall since

project inception as demonstrated in Figure 3.

Criteria Start ‘12 Mid ‘12 Start ‘13 Mid ‘13

Product Quality 8 8 9 9

Domain Competence 7 7 8 8

Willingness to refer offshore partner to others

8 9 9 9

Technical Skills of the Team 8 8 8 9

Quality of Processes 8 8 8 9

Responding Quickly to Queries 9 9 9 10

Figure 3: Partner feedback

More off-shoring

The partners felt confident enough to offshore one more testing mini-project. This involves

new recruitment and is on-going.

A certification centre was set up at the offshore location. Its purpose is to leverage the

knowledge gained from off-shoring certification for this project and assist other projects from

the same domain achieve certification.

Attrition

Attrition rate for the 2-year period ending 2013 was within acceptable limits at 6.45%.

Conclusion

All the solution approaches were chalked up knowing that no single big step would change the

situation, many small changes in the way we engage with partners would make a bigger impact.

The results validate this impact. However, this is just the beginning. Newer and greater challenges lie

ahead:

1. Buffer management – Estimates must be pragmatic. Buffer management is a challenge so that

productivity is enhanced along with quality.

2. Testing automation – Need to increase automation to improve productivity and also control risk by

making tests repeatable

3. Put yourselves in the partners’ shoes – Align with the objectives. Implement learning from the on-

site delegation so as to continuously improve and build on the results achieved

4. Knowledge sharing – A core team has been formed to focus on domain and learning from

customer support team, competitors etc.

The team and partners are confident and the results have given us even more energy to keep walking

along this path of continuing to be the preferred partner by applying the mantra of Entrepreneurial

Project Management.