Tips for Keeping Projects On Track (Waterfall and Kanban)
Welcome back to another blog post, thanks for reading. This week's blog is another multimedia post — and you'll want to both read/watch to fully absorb the message. Read the blog, and when I give you cues to go watch the video, scroll to the bottom of this post to watch. What is project management?
The Project Management Institute defines it as:
“Project management is the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to deliver something of value to people. The development of software for an improved business process, the construction of a building, the relief effort after a natural disaster, the expansion of sales into a new geographic market—these are all examples of projects.”
On job descriptions you will often see it described something like this:
“You will be responsible for managing all aspects of projects from inception to conclusion while communicating with customers and managing customer expectations and subcontractors. You will play a critical role in ensuring projects are completed in a timely, safe and profitable manner…”
Project managers make an average of ~$83K annually.
I love project management. It’s the career path I continue to chip away at each and every single day. And the beauty of project management is, it can apply to several aspects of life - even outside of your work. There are tried and true systems dedicated to adhering to a schedule leading to the inevitable outcome of achievement.
An Overview of the Methodologies We Will Cover:
Waterfall
Kanban
Waterfall Project Management Methodology
The Waterfall approach is one of the older methodologies and a great starting point. It follows a linear approach, where task after task is followed in a sequential manner to achieve the desired outcome.
The Waterfall approach is best used on projects where the desired outcome is fixed. Perhaps it’s an exact number, such as 50 leads. Or it’s a software upgrade release on a specific date: March 21. It is also best for projects where there is little uncertainty. The teams are familiar with the systems, the product or service is understood and unchanging and there are no questions or confusion regarding the outcome. These projects tend to be smaller and low budget.
Gantt Chart
A Gantt Chart is an essential component of a Waterfall led project. It is the visual accountability tracker for all tasks related to your project. Each task has a bar chart to represent the timing of the task as it relates to the outcome of your project. You will use this when we reach the project scheduling phase of the workflow.
But for now, please download the example on this page.
The Workflow
So, you’ve decided the Waterfall methodology sounds good for your project? Excellent! Let’s get started on the workflow. Follow each step in the blog to the best of your ability and tune into the video linked at the bottom to watch me go through a real world example. Use the toggles on the timeline bar to find the part of the video most applicable.
Step 1. Define your project requirements.
First things first, how many questions can you answer from the below?
What are the requirements for this project? (Goals, objectives, KPIs)
Are you solving a problem or pursuing an opportunity?
How are you going to solve it?
How are you going to reach the end goal?
How will you know when you’re done?
What are the deliverables?
What are we going to do?
How are we going to do it?
What are the deadlines?
When will we know we’re done?
What is the budget for this project?
What resources do you need and how much does it cost?
Who are the stakeholders or the people approving the outcome? Are they agreed on what the project is and the desired outcome?
Communication process for stakeholders: How often will you communicate with them, what will be communicated and which format will you use to communicate it?
Process for managing changes: What is the process for adding an additional deliverable that falls outside of the project scope?
What research do you have around this project?
Competitive research
Audience research
Supporting research
Opposing research
Who is your team for this project?
When is the kick off meeting?
If you cannot answer these questions, it is your duty as a project manager to track down who has the answers to these questions. Once you have your answers, follow the steps below.
Take questions 1-4 and plug them into this free template. This is your project scope document.
Take question 5 and plug information into this free template. This is your stakeholder analysis.
Take question 6 and organize into a Word document. That is your research and your team will lean on it.
Take question 7 and create a role clarity document using this free template.
Schedule time on your team meeting (invite the stakeholders) for 25 - 60 minutes depending on how much there is to discuss.
Create the Schedule
There’s two parts to this and it is important you follow them in order. Watch the video I created for a step-by-step on how to set up your Gantt Chart. It’s linked at the bottom of this post and I’ve added timestamps so you can easily navigate to the section of the video you need.
You may also want to create a Work Breakdown System (WBS), depending on the complexity of your project. I won’t go into detail on a WBS during this post, but can in the future if requested.
The Execution Phase
Now that your Gantt Chart is set up, make sure you’ve assigned tasks to the proper people and communicated these tasks to your project team. It is your job as a project manager to consistently monitor and track progress to keep all deliverables on time.
Monitoring and Controlling
One of the most crucial aspects of your role is the ability to anticipate workloads falling off balance and correcting the issue before it impacts the project (or in corporate terms, a “bottleneck”). You’ll discover most of these red flags as you monitor. Remember: it’s okay to ask your team questions about how they’re feeling or why a deliverable is delayed.
Finally, regularly set time with stakeholders to review progress and let them know how things are coming along. If the project has been derailed in any way, do not hide this from them but rather address it head on using this formula:
State the issue and the impacts + state the solution + state any cascading effects it may have and your plan to address those
Take it over the finish line
Depending on your project, you may require testing and software releases (many project managers work in IT). Alternatively, if your project is simpler (building a website for a client) you may be able to just launch. The client needs to approve and accept the project is complete.
Wrap up work
Make sure you don’t miss any final administrative work including final budget, saving approvals from your stakeholders in a safe place and then taking the time to congratulate your team (and yourself!) on a job well done.
Kanban Project Management Methodology
I’m sure we’ve all heard of agile project management. Kanban is a subset of agile frameworks with an emphasis on painting a picture for teammates to check in with project progress at any point. To see me walk through a real world example of utilizing Kanban, watch the video linked at the bottom of the blog. There are timestamps applied so you can easily skip to the relevant part of the video for you.
The Four Principles of Kanban
Start With What You Do Now: Don’t start from scratch. Evaluate current capabilities and identify gaps or holes to fill.
Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change: Implement sprints (stay with me, we’ll get to it) to begin producing outcomes now. We’ll continue to optimize these outcomes as we move through more sprints.
Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities, and titles: Ensure you’re familiar with the team you will work with and create role clarity to instill harmony.
Encourage acts of leadership at all levels in your organization: All team members should feel comfortable coming forward with problems, solutions and ideas. As a project manager, you are leading this culture for the team on said project.
The Six Kanban Practices
Visualize: You’ll use a Kanban board to create a project dashboard. Click here to download a Kanban board template - we’ll get to the set up momentarily.
Limit Work-In-Progress (WIP): As a project manager, one of your primary duties is to manage the team capacity. The amount of cards in your project dashboard will signal you to if the team is overloaded and where work needs to be paused or delegated.
Manage Flow: Another critical job as a project manager - it is up to you to keep the workflow moving. This means consistently monitoring the board and checking in with your team to stay on top of potential bottlenecks, risks, etc.
Make policies explicit: Document, document, document. You’ll want to have this all laid out before the project begins. Honestly, I would revisit the “Project Requirements” step from Waterfall to ensure you have properly documented the project details. Make sure all team members can easily access this at any point throughout the project.
Implement feedback loops: Since the point of agile frameworks is to quickly produce an outcome and then continuously optimize it, you’ll want to create regular opportunities for feedback. These can come via weekly stand ups or at bi-weekly/monthly project reviews.
Improve collaboratively, expand experimentally:
The Workflow
It’s time to dig into your project. We’re going to assume you have all of your project policies documented and in an easy to find spot for team members. Grab the Kanban board you downloaded because it’s time to set it up. Trello is an amazing and free service to use if you wish to run a project using Kanban methodology.
On your Kanban board, you will find these columns:
To-Do
In Progress
In Review
Complete
Each column is going to have a Kanban card. A card represents a deliverable to be completed. Your Kanban card needs to include:
Brief description of task
Who is responsible for it
Due date
Each teammate is responsible for moving their card from column to column.
Don’t forget about Kanban Practice #2: Limit WIP. In the policies you created, you should define how many cards can exist on a Kanban board at a time. I recommend keeping your own separate backlog of deliverables to rotate onto the Kanban board once there is room.
The Retrospective
A key piece of Kanban agile framework is principle #5: implement feedback loops. This can happen at weekly team meetings but you should also schedule a team retrospective following project completion. The agenda for this meeting should be to discuss how everyone felt the project went, what went well, what could be improved next time, if KPIs were achieved and if not, why not.
