I just got back from an excellent training session. IT project management. We still haven't woken up. We learned a lot of new things and discovered that we were already applying some of the rules from the course without knowing that they were defined by someone before us.
There are many more tips that we will internalize after two or three more projects. Until then, here are some notes taken between the exercises in the course.
1. In IT, one of the formulas for success is Success=Quality x Acceptance (time). It is about quality the product delivered to the customer and the level of acceptance of the product, which depends on time. More in Romanian? Our trainer Marian Stirbescu gave us the example of an Audi Q7. Almost no one questions the quality of this premium minibus, but for various reasons there are quite a few who would not want such a car. If they received it for free, they would probably sell it to buy the car they really dreamed of. Why is acceptance a function of time? We mature, we change, we want something else after a few years. We may even start to like the product. But the moral of the formula is that it is not enough for a "deliverable" to be of quality. It must also be easily accepted by the customer at the time of delivery.
2. How long does it take for members of a new group to collaborate and become a team? Experience shows that if they work non-stop on the same project, no matter how much they argue or hate each other at first, they will collaborate after just four days. The explanation: when there is a common interest, a single concern constantly pursued, misunderstandings fade faster. It is a natural psychological process. The reverse? If the people in the team deal with the project little by little, maybe an hour or 30 minutes a day, between other concerns, it will take 40 days until they start to put their ego aside and help each other.
3. The power of „How do you like it?” is huge. Ask for feedback from as many people on the client’s team as possible, especially if they are not directly involved. Then, when they gossip in the elevator or at the coffee shop about „what’s going on in the company,” they will speak positively or at least neutrally about the project, simply because you recently involved them, without them knowing, with a banal „How do you like project X?” To paraphrase Marian, isn’t it better for their feedback to come to us than to be extinguished, over a cigarette, in the internal corporate battles?
What do you think?