Sep 23

Daily Scrum common mistakes


The daily scrum is part of the empirical control process in Scrum.Ā  Some of the common mistakes that avoid inspection and adaption.

1. Status Meeting vs. Goal-Oriented Focus:
Teams often fall into reporting completed tasks (e.g., ā€œI finished tasks A, B, and Cā€). The daily meeting should be more goal-driven. Instead of focusing on tasks, try shifting the conversation: ā€œI worked on this to help achieve our sprint goal, and today I will focus on this next step.ā€ This keeps everyone aligned on the bigger picture.

2. Micromanagement:
Sometimes managers use the daily as an opportunity to micromanage. Keeping the manager as a listener is crucial to fostering autonomy. Let the team self-organize and problem-solve, without external pressure.

3. Endless Dailies:
In less mature teams daily stand-ups can be extra long. One simple fix: timebox each intervention. When team members know they have 2 minutes to share, they go to the point, focusing on essential updates that drive progress toward the sprint goal.

Sep 19

Mixing roles in Scrum

Mixing roles in Scrum, like having one person act as both Product Owner and Scrum Master, can lead to challenges. It’s like a two-headed dragonā€”one role focuses on driving the team’s direction (Product Owner), while the other ensures the team’s well-being and process (Scrum Master).

When these roles conflict, especially under pressure from stakeholders, there’s a risk of burnout if proper control mechanisms aren’t in place. On the flip side, without a sense of urgency, the team might struggle to meet their goals.

Balancing these roles is crucial for maintaining team health and productivity.

Sep 17

How to Measure Project Success: Lessons from NASA’s Space Shuttle Program (1981ā€“2011)

The Space Shuttle Program was one of NASA’s most ambitious projects, designed to create a reusable spacecraft for low Earth orbit missions. From 1981 to 2011, the program achieved impressive feats, but it also highlighted critical lessons on how to define and measure project success.

Early Wins, Long-Term Challenges

When the Space Shuttle Columbia launched in 1981, it marked a new era in space exploration. Over the next three decades, shuttles like Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour completed various missionsā€”from deploying satellites to assembling the International Space Station (ISS), one of humanity’s most significant collaborations in space.

Yet, despite these successes, the program fell short of its original promises. NASA aimed for frequent, affordable space travel, but each launch cost about $450 millionā€”far exceeding initial estimates. Extensive refurbishments were required after each mission, reducing the impact of the shuttle’s reusability.

The program’s reputation suffered further after two tragic accidents: Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, leading to multi-year flight suspensions and raising serious safety concerns. Ultimately, by the time the program was retired in 2011, its total cost had surpassed $196 billion. Though it delivered major milestones like the Hubble Space Telescope and the ISS, the Space Shuttle Program didnā€™t fully meet its core objectives: safe, reliable, and affordable space travel.

Defining Success in Projects: A Critical Lesson

In many projects, teams invest months of effort, only to launch a product or service with little clarity on whether it meets expectations. The lesson here is clear: defining success criteria early is essential for guiding the project to its intended goals.

Success criteria are measurable goals and standards that determine whether a project has achieved its objectives. Here are a few examples:

  • “This feature will reduce customer help desk calls by 10%.”
  • “We aim to increase customer engagement in the app by 5%.”
  • “The project must be completed under a $500,000 budget.”

One of the first questions I ask during any projectā€™s inception phase is, ā€œWhy are we here, and how will we measure success?ā€ Answering these questions helps us define the projectā€™s scope and make necessary adjustments throughout its lifecycle.

Just as the Space Shuttle Program achieved great things but missed some of its critical objectives, our projects can have significant milestones while still failing to deliver on their core promisesā€”unless we define what success looks like upfront.

Sep 13

Project Management and “The Emperorā€™s New Clothes”

Hans Christian Andersenā€™s story The Emperorā€™s New Clothes (1837) teaches a lesson that is still relevant today, especially in project management.

In the story, an emperor who loves his clothes hires two scammers pretending to be tailors. They promise to make him a special, invisible outfit to anyone “stupid.” Of course, no one wants to admit they canā€™t see the clothes, so the emperor and his advisors go along with the scam. The emperor even parades through the streets wearing nothing, and the crowd pretends they can see the outfit. Only when a child says, ā€œBut heā€™s wearing nothing at all!ā€ does the truth come out. Still, the emperor keeps going, unwilling to admit the obvious.

This story reflects situations where people ignore the truth because theyā€™re afraid to speak up.

Sounds familiar? Iā€™ve been part of projects that echo this taleā€”large-scale, cross-country integrations or complex product launchesā€”where leadership insists on a timeline that no one believes is achievable. The days move on, and yet no one dares to challenge the feasibility of the goal, fearing theyā€™ll be seen as the “fool” in the room.

In project management, these “Emperorā€™s New Clothes” moments can happen when people are afraid to ask tough questions or challenge unrealistic goals. But the best thing we can do is speak up and ensure weā€™re honest about whatā€™s achievable.

Letā€™s aim for transparency in our projects and not be afraid to ask difficult questions before itā€™s too late.

May 05

Building KPIĀ“s

If you have to achieve goals in your companyĀ you have to measure the performance or success in your activities. AĀ KPI (Key Performance Indicator) report is a great way to do it.

A KPI is a measurable value that shows if a company is performing well and achieving the goals or business objectives or if a process or service is working well.

-Number of bookings in an online store page during the holiday season (Business objective)

-Number of issues solved in a Software Maintenance Service (Service Performance)

-Number of calls issues solved in a call centerĀ (Service Performance)

During the process of defining and creating the KPIĀ“s we have to avoid :

-Measures are not relevant

-The data are not accurate and we have changes between similar periods

-The measures are not aligned with the company strategy goals

-The final report with the measurement are not easy to understand

-The first measurement of this could be use to establish a baseline in order to compare an improve in the future periods.

Measuring a Service Performance with KPIĀ“s

Let see, we have a Service that provides support to all employees in a company that sells air conditioning equipment that are using an specific CRM software. The Service consist in a Call Center and a dedicated team that solves issues and create new features for software based on the business needs.

We want to have an accurate view about the performance of this service about the software performance and how the team is dedicating his time.

So what we need to measure?

With a clear goals we have to ask the right questions, and every question will lead us to a KPI measure.

BlogKPIS1

Get accurate measures: We need a tool to track the activity of the process. It could be a ticketing tool a database, something where we can get clear registers of the activity that we want to measure.

Are these measures meaningful?: We should avoid overmeasure or get measures that has not sense.

When we get the measures we have to prepare dashboard with the monthly results. In this dashboard we should include

  • YoY measures in order to have an overview
  • Clear data about the last two months
  • Some comments about why we get this data.

Below some examples how we show the KPIĀ“sĀ with and overview of the last 12 months and data about the average and the last two months

Response and resolution time: this KPI shows a trend that the issue grew duringĀ mid summer because this company has more activity (they sell air conditioning equipments), but along the time the response time is going down

BlogKPI2

Capacity vs demand: this KPI show if the team is overloaded during the last 12 months. But we have the capacity and the demand aligned

BlogKPI4

% Demand vs time logged in issues: this KPI shows that the team efficiency solving issues

Ā 

Apr 06

The quality cost

What is quality in a project? If we have a project that requires manufacturing 10000 cardboard boxes for a luxury fashion house. How can we measure the quality of this project? Someone will tell us that the boxes should be resistant, others will request that the boxes should be provided with a cool design, and others that the boxes must could carrier more than 5 kilograms. But if our client only needs a simple cardboard box to store apparel and the boxes will not be used for shipping why are we requesting these extra features?

The PMBOK defines the quality project as the degree to which the project fulfills requirements. In this case, a simple cardboard box with the requested measures will provide enough quality to the project.

The meet the expected quality the Project needs a quality control or test phase to ensure that there are no errors in the final product.

How we can test the final product? It depends on the product. In our boxes project, we have to ensure that the boxes have the expected measures. But have we to measure 10000 cardboard boxes?

When we prepare a quality control or quality assurance process we have to apply a cost-benefit rule. So the cost of quality test should be lower than the cost of reprocessing or non-conformance. Maybe in our project measure 10000 boxes could be more expensive than re-manufacture 100 boxes.

QualityCost

To avoid extra costs in the quality there are statistical techniques that allow test a sample of boxes and ensure a certain level of quality.

Example:

If the cost of measuring one box is one dollar, and we have a statistical method that ensures that if we take a sample of 2000 units the confidence level is 5%. This means that 95% of boxes should have the correct measures. So if we measure 2000 units we can ensure that we only have 500 boxes with incorrect measurements that we will reprocess.

On other hand we can measure 10000 units to ensure that we have 0 incorrect boxes

As we can see above the quality test with a sample and using statistical methods have a better cost benefits ratio.

QualityCost2