Project manager’s pain: “Tech Talks” series

Every Thursday, at 4 pm, the QArea team has an internal company event called “Tech Talks”. It is held with the aim of sharing expertise between colleagues from different departments. Every time there’s a new speaker, who prepares an informative speech about something he/she is professional in.

We decided not to stop on this and share our knowledge with the readers too. Today we dive into the insights from the speech of one of our IT Project Managers — Andrey Osipenko. He tells us about the initial project management steps — customer interviews and requirement gathering. Find out about the key points that make Project Managers suffer and learn how to avoid them.

The pain

Excellent project management is usually taken for granted and this makes the job of Project Manager quite hard. You always have to motivate yourself because nobody else will. On the other hand, poor management is noticed in the blink of an eye, because everybody and everything starts to fail.

There are cases when programmers find and deliver the best possible solution to do everything according to the requirement. However, the Project Manager has another point of view and expects a totally different business logic not in what programmers do but in how they do it. Guess who’ll be blamed. Of course Project Manager.

Software development companies have so many different people working under one roof, and all of them can give you material proof of their job daily. A designer will show you the sketch. A programmer will show you their code. The Project Manager will be that one guy who scrolls through the random pages all day and aimlessly clicks on the links. Or so it seems. In fact, they do the market research and analysis, but they can’t prove that. The only tangible evidence of a good PM’s job is a successfully delivered project.

The concern

Clients seldom approach outsourcing partners with clearly defined requirements and instructions to how to meet them. Nobody ever comes in with detailed sketches, wireframes, user-stories, hands them to the team of developers who happily do exactly as they’re told and deliver the project.

In real life, the client comes and says “I want an app that does A, includes B and C, and works really well.” It’s then the job of a qualified Project Manager to turn that idea into a working product. The client might “want a checkbox here,” but they might not understand how that checkbox will interact with the rest of the system and what kind of influence it will have on overall performance. The client might “want it to be beautiful”, but they might not realize that there are thousands of beautiful applications but not all of them bring value to the user. The client wants it. And here’s where a qualified Project Manager starts his game.

The solution

The key to successful negotiations with the client is asking the right questions.

This is one of the best tips for new Project Managers. Every PM has the goal to clearly communicate the client’s idea to the team of developers and make their lives easier. They have to put together all the desires of the customer, shape them into tasks, create a logic, and divide the workload equally between the team members.

Though being technical Project Managers, they also have to put on roles of psychologists, who pitch the customers with ideas they never had on their mind before. This helps to prevent future conflicts. For instance, your team did a great job but the clients are not happy with the outcome, simply because they forgot to mention a couple of critical details, that change the whole scope of the project.

The interview has to be thoughtfully planned beforehand. Questions a project manager should ask have to dig deep into the core of the idea. The deeper — the better. For example: “Imagine you are the user of your product and explain your feelings. What was your first thought when you realized you needed this product? Whom were you with? What were the surroundings? How did you find the product? Were there any troubles finding a solution to your issue? How did you feel when you started using the product?”. Usually, the project management process includes writing question-maps that can include more than 50 questions to have a full scope of the product and understand the feelings of future target users.

The boredom

Documentation is a small part of the Project Manager duties list but quite a significant one. All desires of the client have to be carefully documented and signed by both: the client and the company, so when you deliver the final project there is ample proof that your team did everything as required.

Anyway, we focus on the initial part of cooperation and the next important thing after the interview is the sketch that holds the product’s scope in detail. This sketch will help the PM to create an actual plan of the work to be done, define the choice of tools/techniques/methodologies, and basically keep the track of the idea from the start till the very end of the software development process.

There are two key types of sketches that every project management professional has to be able to make after talking to the client: “Jobs to be done” and “User story”.

The “Jobs to be done” pattern has to explain what problem will be solved with the help of the product, and it looks somewhat like this:

When <situation / context>, I want to <motivation / stimulus>, So that <expected outcome / benefit / value>. Let’s take Uber application for example: “When I finish drinking whiskey at the bar with my friends, I want to have a ride home so that I can get some sleep.”

The “User story” is a bit differently from “Jobs to be done”. Its aim is to explain how your application will satisfy the demands of the target audience. It doesn’t have a fixed pattern because every product has its unique functionality. The User Story is made up from scratch for every project separately and is usually based on the “Jobs to be done” sketch.

Let’s demonstrate this with the same example: “When I finish drinking at the bar, I want to have a ride home. I want it to be quick and comfortable, and I need to have the ability to track the route of my driver, and to pay with a card instead of cash, and to rate my ride to help other users when they make a choice of the service”.

The end

Getting closer to the end of the topic (not the end of the development process, however), it’s important to mention that there is much more to say about the initial planning stage of project management life cycle. Price and time estimations have to be thoroughly considered according to the realistic capabilities of the development team, the available budget, and the expected outcome. And let’s not forget about possible risks that may lead to the tech debt in case of poor project management.