The common-project-problems tag has no wiki summary.
4
votes
2answers
74 views
Do I Need to Match-up the Functional Spec with the Spec in the Contract
This maybe a bit of a noob question to you client facing PM's out there, but I'm a PM with a pre-sales background, so please bear with me.
I'm used to working on projects where you have an initial ...
3
votes
5answers
99 views
Do you include “communication” aspects in your formal agreements with clients?
We all know that in management the communication with the client (product owner or sponsor) is one of the key factors. It's good when both sides understand the communication aspect but from time to ...
10
votes
6answers
257 views
How to suggest project improvements in a rigid / narrow-minded environment?
Briefing:
What would you do if you were a new employee at a small company that has a lot of talent but seems to have gotten by with ad-hoc processes simply because they've had mostly small projects ...
6
votes
5answers
268 views
What went wrong - project going off track
I'm not a PM. I'm a developer working on a large project with a small team at an 18 person company. The "team" is just me and the project manager. The project isn't the largest my company has ever had ...
4
votes
5answers
119 views
How do I get traction on my project?
As a newbie project manager, I am leading an effort to transition data from one department to another. My counterpart in the other department acts as interface with their development staff.
I am ...
5
votes
4answers
214 views
How to handle difficult Project Manager
I always feel difficulty to face my project manager and don't know how to handle him. There are many situations in which I feel very bad because of his behaviour.
1) While discussion about time ...
4
votes
6answers
153 views
How to I cut down on all of the communications?
I am new to Project Management. I am coming in on a project that was just implemented and is now in Post Implementation. The roles do not seem to be fully understood be everyone. Now, when something ...
10
votes
7answers
226 views
Project complete but does not really satisfy the end users. Business owners unhappy
Some background on the project:
I recently completed a project for a company. The project was a fairly
large line of business web site. The customer was a company with no
prior experience ...
2
votes
4answers
135 views
In project management, How might you adjust the project if you don’t have resources when you need them?
In project management, How might you adjust the project if you don’t have resources when you need them?
5
votes
5answers
370 views
Agile and Scrum:- approaches, problems, common mistakes and lessons learned
From doing Agile and Scrum are there any lessons you can pass on from your experiences?
Are there any approaches that work better than others?
Which of the many parts of the theories have you found ...
2
votes
6answers
275 views
how to define success and failure criteria of project?
I got client requirement now i want to design strategy and criteria to measure success and failure of project please help me to do this actually i m developer now i got work of project manager so ...
2
votes
3answers
87 views
Get enough information from client to start project
I am trying to create a form that request for information from a prospective client, this form will have to work for all kinds of industry (business, construction, design, programming...).
In most ...
4
votes
4answers
159 views
How do I handle a personality conflict between a vendor and customer's employee?
Is there a recommended process for handling two people from different teams who cannot get along? Should I start with their managers, and work my way down? It seems like a simple problem that requires ...
2
votes
4answers
88 views
How to frame 'Cancellation Clause' in the contract?
I work for a consultancy firm and it happened (rarely) that the project got cancelled after 1 week of the day it should be starting. No work has been done, but the allocation of the developers were ...
6
votes
4answers
192 views
What do to if a signed project got cancelled?
I have a X dollars project under my belt. It supposed to start on Monday. But client refused to go forward and I waited for them for a week. How do software consulting firms deal with this situations?
...
3
votes
2answers
77 views
Can I ask the stakeholders to review my project plan?
I met with the project stakeholders. I documented their goals into a standard WBS structure and a project plan.
Can I present my project plan to the stakeholders and ask them for input/feedback on ...
5
votes
6answers
181 views
Project Estimation is off by 50% or More! Who is Responsible for Vague Requirements?
I've just started doing some small contracts for the first time, and I'm working on a project with a person responsible for dealing with the client and analyzing requirements.
In this case, there was ...
13
votes
8answers
628 views
Why can't the scrum master and the project manager be the same person?
How a scrum master does compare to a traditional project manager, and can either role coincide with the role of product manager or project sponsor / project owner?
4
votes
9answers
177 views
How to have your opinion and idea listened by more senior people?
Why is it difficult for people to accept the right solution coming from a person who is new to the organization? Like if you see a place where some changes can lead to greater improvement and your ...
9
votes
5answers
204 views
PM learns deliverable is vaporware, team has been hiding it from the client & want PM to lie to client also.
I will TRY to keep this simple. I was brought on this project approx. 1/2 way through to fill the role of CM DB SME(20+yrs broad based experience). The PM (non-technical by his own admission) ...
1
vote
5answers
144 views
Statistical Product: How to handle projects effectively
Some background: In our organization we develop statistical product and there are big team of statisticians. They often changed specification due to change in clients' requirements. We have n number ...
3
votes
5answers
235 views
What are the effective Knowledge Transfer recommended processes
Due to heavy attrition rate my project team usually get new developers at various stages of the projects and sometimes even in the maintenance phase.
We are currently following an informal way of ...
5
votes
6answers
296 views
How do you minimize the impact of a politically necessary “poisonous” team member?
I am currently part of a project team evaluating the products of a vendor to develop an integrated solution to several of our legacy systems.
I am not the project manager on this particular project, ...
2
votes
1answer
140 views
Task planing/Scheduling software
I'm looking for software for organizing a "workout routine". Not weights but things in general where I want an organized plan of action to accomplish a long term goal.
Essentially I want something ...
9
votes
4answers
302 views
What if project manager is appreciating an undeserving team member?
I am working as a Senior Software Engineer. I am also a module lead and am leading a team of 2.
One of the guys is very abrasive and shows a reprehensible and arrogant attitude towards the fellow ...
20
votes
10answers
346 views
How can I get my team to value self-organization and self-improvement?
I'm working as a project leader in a team of 5 developers and myself and taking the role of analyst. Within the company, we've been applying the agile principles for several years.
Some of the ...
3
votes
3answers
216 views
Do you know any companies that rotate developers between different projects on regular basis?
I work for a smallish outsourcing company of about 30 people, nearly all of them developers. At any given moment we have 6-9 projects in development for various clients. Most of the projects are ...
3
votes
2answers
249 views
How to structure a “work package”?
Could someone give me the information about how one structures the s.c. "work packages"? I have never done this before but that's my task now. I need to describe use-cases, perliminary definitions, ...
3
votes
4answers
168 views
Can my customer ask for his money back?
I am a lone developer who built a billing system for a customer as moonlighting job. We had worked together previously on a number of occassions and as a reults no contract was ever signed between ...
3
votes
4answers
223 views
Denying payments as a project deadline penalty
I've just had a bad project experience. I was a subcontract programmer of a subcontract software house. I've been assigned as a single developer to build an application.
During the development ...
1
vote
3answers
162 views
Who should bear the cost of upgrade? Client or Provider?
We are in the middle of developing iPhone app.
iOS 5 is recently released.
Now if we run the same codes in iOS 5 we get lot of errors / crashes. Should we charge the client to get the code ...
1
vote
1answer
76 views
How to add slippage to a project when using Microsoft Project 2007?
I have a plan with original dates that I would like to keep but then I have a project phase that is now delayed. Are there recommended approaches when using Project 2007? Thanks
4
votes
2answers
136 views
Is it important to have a clearly defined methodology from the outset of a project?
I'm a final year undergraduate student studying software engineering. 1 module for my final year consists of a development project of approximately 6 months.
I'm completely new to this level of ...
2
votes
3answers
132 views
How do you track and measure multitasked work and deliverables between different teams?
Projects have different tasks. As PM, you need to measure how effective the team member with the task he/she is executing. What if the team member multitasks? How do you measure multitasking? I have ...
3
votes
1answer
357 views
Managing a Visual Studio Project on Github(Git DVCS) [closed]
I am noobishly new to Git version control system having used Tortoise Svn, VSS. I thought of contributing my code as open source work on github[moving by crowds voice], i did open a account and create ...
0
votes
2answers
87 views
How to manage logins and passwords securely over a network
I'm part of a small but growing web development team and I'm trying to make our processes more efficient. One of the problems we have is that when I arrived here, all of the FTP details/logins etc ...
1
vote
2answers
302 views
Are there good templates and processes for monitoring project progress?
When managing a team of 40-50 team members, are there good processes and templates to monitor project progress? We do daily standup meetings and weekly email reports, but we're looking for more ...
0
votes
1answer
123 views
“Death March” projects - any writers apart from Yourdon?
After digging through Google, it appears that Edward Yourdon has done most of the original writing on this topic.
Are there any other writers who have covered this, or a similar topic, related to ...
4
votes
5answers
167 views
How can I gather requirements from those who don't want to give time for interviewing?
Actually, I'm a fresh CS graduate, who wants to build a system for his dad's road transport business.
However, the issue is, whenever I go to ask to him about:
who are the people involved in his ...
3
votes
2answers
143 views
Questions to ask to the client before making any cms for them?
I need a comprehensive list of questions or at least basic idea of which questions to be asked to the client before customizing a cms for them?
I may use Wordpress, Drupal, Sharepoint or anything, I ...
1
vote
1answer
84 views
Resources for reviewing and learning from real-world projects?
I'm currently studying the "death march" phenomenon, as it relates to project management.
(From my understanding, the term "death march" refers to a project which is evidently at high risk of ...
9
votes
12answers
906 views
What Project Management Tools do you use especially for private projects?
I've tried a lot of Project Management Tools like Trac, Jira or Redmine.
I use these tools to get more structure in my daily work and projects and I like to use these tools for private ...
5
votes
7answers
881 views
How do you define “done” on a project or task?
From time to time, I get status updates from the technical team that a specific feature is "done." However, when I check it, it hasn't fully been tested or ux tested with common-sense.
How would you ...
4
votes
3answers
298 views
Software tool for resource pipeline planning for multiple projects
My company has about 20 - 30 open projects at any given time, as well as 5 - 10 that have been approved and will start within the next few weeks.
We currently use Basecamp to manage the projects and ...
2
votes
3answers
153 views
Bridging the Knowledge Gap in Projects
So far we've been very comfortable managing projects that have similar technical characteristics with our past projects. For instance we choose to get involve in a python based web application ...
4
votes
7answers
177 views
What are some indicators that a project may require a Real project manager?
I've worked on many teams, medium size (20+ developers) and smaller, and for the most part the project lead managed the project in terms of projections, collecting and reporting tasks and status ...
6
votes
6answers
420 views
How to Introduce innovative change in organizational processes when upper management defends status quo
I have been involved in a couple of project for the past year, and I have been lucky to work with the brilliant team. I noticed that in each of these project there seem to be one or two persons who ...
7
votes
8answers
857 views
Why Project Management is so hard?
I know a lot of Project Managers and they are all over 30 years old.
Are all project managers like that?
I mean, is this about getting more experience than at least 7-8 years?
Or being a Project ...
6
votes
6answers
163 views
Are processes and procedures only for enterprises?
I've had the opportunity to work at quite a few start-ups. One thing I've found to be common in them is adhoc way of doing things and ignorance towards processes, best practices and known project ...
4
votes
4answers
147 views
How to Give Better Estimations to Customers
We are working in an environment where customers give us thick requirement documents and they expect the technical team to do an estimation on the whole requirement. Once they receive our estimates, ...
