I was invited to a project evaluation with one of my clients together with a freelancer I have employed to help me out.
The project evaluation is a formal process and is required to close the project officially.
Anyway we where not many at the meeting, since most of the resources are busy are were consultants (like me) and are not longer on location.
Anyway we discussed the project and we all agreed on the criticism and bad and good parts. The problems where so obvious that we could all agree. This was aspects like:
- Changing project managers
- Too many project managers
- Too large scope
- Limited availability of critical resources
- Lack of proper resources
- Bad communication from line-managers
- Unstable test environments
- Unfinished deliverables from other projects
- Misunderstandings and lack of communication
If one look at the above bullets, there are plenty of red lights and warnings signs.
We are going to follow up on this meeting in order to fill out a required form.
We discussed the future of projects with the client representatives and it seems as if not much is going to change in the future, but we are certainly aware of the problems we face when doing projects, it does not seems as if the clients organization are learning from the mistakes, but at least the individuals do (I have raised this point before in my journal). So we are not completely lost.
Another sad thing is that the evaluation form is required to be filled out, but to the knowledge of the people I talk to, it is not put to use.
I am considering whether it would be possible to run projects for this client in my company so we do not have all these problems and we can have more formal requirements to other departments and resources.
I am currently in the process of outlining the logicLAB project model, this model has been long under way and is a refinement of ideas I have had for years - it seems to resemble SCRUM and bit and I will steal and borrow as much as possible from other methodologies, since this will be continuous work.
So we are optimistic and there are plenty of projects, but it would be good for the sake of our sanity if things would run at least a bit more
smoothly in the future.
