Get a Work / Life Balance on Projects

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Get a Work / Life Balance on Projects—Part I

What is a “Work / Life Balance”? To us, it’s “getting the maximum enjoyment from your work time and personal time, every day”. This means really enjoying the time you have at work, and the time you spend after hours, so that you’re getting the most out of what life has to offer. The reverse of this is not enjoying your job, and not having a personal life. If you’re in that camp, then read these 10 tips to get back on track:

Tip 1: Prioritize

Sit down over a nice warm drink and ask yourself this question. “If this was your last day on this planet and you were reviewing your adult life to date, then what would you say about it and what would you wish you’d done differently?” Think long and hard about this question, then write down your answer. Now set out a clear vision for what you’re going to do differently, from this point onwards.

Remember, you may not need to make radical changes to improve your life. It’s usually just about priorities. Write down a new set of priorities for your life, ones that mean the most to you.

Tip 2: Set Goals

Now you need to set yourself 3 personal goals, to help you “get the maximum enjoyment from your work time and personal time every day”. For example, your goals might relate to your physical health, your personal time or the way you approach your work. The goals must together help you to achieve your perfect work /life balance (as defined above).

Tip 3: Watch your Hours

It makes sense that to achieve a perfect work/life balance, you need to enjoy both your work, and your personal life. If you work around the clock, then you may not get the time to have a personal life. So try and balance your work time, family time and personal time, so that you actually make time to achieve your goals.

Tip 4: Look after Yourself

You should now set out a health plan for the next 2 months, to make sure that you look after yourself as best as you can. Set simple goals for eating the right foods, exercizing 2-3 times a week and doing the little things that make you feel good. If you feel great, then you’ll gain tons of new energy you never new you had before, and you can throw this new energy into things that make you feel even better.

Tip 5: Socialize

We’re not all “social butterflies” but it’s a well known fact that socializing with good friends is a great way to reduce stress. Make a special effort to make a new friend sometime soon. It may sound corny, but new friendships often add spice to life.

The 5 Phases of IT Projects

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According to Google, "IT and Software" projects are now the most common type of project undertaken within the field of Project Management. So what are the phases in a project life cycle, that involves IT and Software? We've set them out for you below...

Tip 1: Analysis

The first step for an IT project involves analyzing your requirements for a solution. To do this, you need to analyze your business environment, processes, systems, people and organizational structure, to help you set out exactly what it is that the new IT solution must deliver. Typically, companies write a "Requirements Specification" which sets out their business requirements formally, so that at the end of the project, they have a formal stake in the ground, against which the solution can be measured.

Tip 2: Design

When you know what it is that you want, the next step is to design a solution for meeting those needs. In the design phase, you will design all of the components of the solution, including the; hardware, software, user interface, security and integration with other systems. The Project Manager will often get a "prototype" built, so that the customer can see roughly what the solution will look and feel like, before the development phase begins.

Tip 3: Develop

The longest and most time consuming phase is always the development of the system. This involves writing software code, constructing hardware, building the database, writing the user interface and fitting together each of the components into a complete solution for the customer. It's during this phase that most delays are experienced, and they are typically due to insufficient analysis and design being completed.

Tip 4: Test

When the solution has been built, it's time to test that it performs as expected. A smart tester will have already agreed with the customer what it is that should be tested and what the outcome should be. If this is done, then testing is more of a formality and there should be "no surprises" during the testing process. There are various types of testing, including system / load / performance / security / user interface testing.

Tip 5: Implement

After comprehensive testing, you're ready to "Go Live". You do this by installing the hardware at the customers site, installing the sotware, and migrating the data over from the existing system to the new system. Some final "checks and balances" are performed to ensure that the data is accurate and the system is performing as expected, and then you're finished.

T h e R e t e n t i o n D i l e m m a

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W h y P r o d u c t i v e W o r k e r s L e a v e

One-third of the workforce—gone in two years
Why are your people leaving?
A little history
Research results—why people quit
Key retention issues by job category

S e v e n T h i n g s C o m p a n i e s C a n D o
T o R e d u c e A t t r i t i o n
1. Show them you care
2. Be lean—but not mean
3. Walk the talk
4. Measure “soft” skills
5. Fight attrition with smart training
6. Weed out poor managers
7. Eliminate weak performers in non-management ranks

5 Tips for Managing Scope... (Method 123)

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Does your customer often change their requirements half way though the project, putting pressure on your budget and delivery dates? If this happens to you. Then read these...

Why does a customer change their requirements frequently? Simply because your project scope is fixed for a period of time, yet your customers business is constantly changing. And the bad news is that the longer your project is, the more likely it is that your customer will want to change their requirements. So how do you manage this?

Tip 1: Set it in Concrete

Sounds simple, but the first step is to define the scope of the project in depth. It sounds easy-but what really is the scope of the project?

We define scope as "the complete set of deliverables that you need to produce for your customer". This means that by defining your project deliverables in depth, you're actually defining your project scope in depth at the same time!

Tip 2: Plan it Out

When you create your project plan, don't just list the "activities" that need to be undertaken to complete the project. Instead, group all of the activities in your plan under the relevant deliverables, so that you can see which activities contribute to the completion of each deliverable in your project.

And of course, once each set of activities are finished, you can mark the corresponding deliverable as 100% complete. In this way, you'll be able to keep an eye on the status of each deliverable and therefore monitor the progress of your project, against the agreed scope.

Tip 3: Monitor Quality

Yes it's important that you complete all of the deliverables listed in you project plan, however it's also important that these deliverables meet your customers expectations. These expectations are called "quality targets" and they describe how the deliverables will function or perform.

And to meet these quality targets, you'll need to put in place "quality controls", which are checks to ensure that the deliverable is going to "do what it's supposed to do". Only then, can you rest assured that the project is going to be signed off by the customer.

Tip 4: Manage Changes

This is possibly the most valuable tip. Every time your customer changes their requirements, make sure that you document their change request and then review the impact of that change, on your project deliverables. If the change is going to impact on your ability to deliver the project on time, within budget and to spec, then get the customer to sign off the change. Then hound them for more money, time or people, or whatever it is that you will need to implement the change effectively.

Tip 5: Report Everything

And lastly, report on any changes that have happened and their effect on the project. This will ensure that if you pass your project deadline, you can show that it was the change requests that caused it. Your customer will be more understanding (as they probably requested the changes in the first place) and your team won't go into "crises mode" as most teams do when they are officially ‘late'.

So by defining the scope at the outset and setting out your deliverables in your plan, and then monitoring quality and changes, you can manage the scope of your project in a formal, controlled fashion, that's acceptable to your customer.