Time for modernization. Technology is opening vast opportunities for remote work. And every single industry can leverage it. No excuse!
Integrating remote work in the processes is not something that comes with turning on the button. It takes time to align everyone to proceed to this change.
This comes from the capacity of a company to be agile to the new set of rules and processes. Being able to be agile is part of the leadership’s vision and willingness.
Better to pick it up to consistently improve your productivity in any project management workflows and be ready for any type of crisis.
Process of remote work
Most companies have the same set of tools to manage remote work in a crisis. How each company is using these tools makes a big difference:
- O365 or Google or WeChat Pro
- WeChat and Skype or Zoom or Webex or Gotomeeting, –
- any dial-up VPN
- Remote Desktop.
Companies frequently asked the following questions which can be unrelevant:
- What’s the best software to do that?
- Is software X better than software Y?
- Can you prove that software X is better than competitor Y?
Here are a few rules to choose the right solution to fit your company:
Rule 1: if a piece of software is on the market and it had to pay customers for a few years, it is good enough for you.
Rule 2: if two competing pieces of software are at comparable prices, they tend to be very similar in feature, technology, user base.
Rule 3: everything else being equal, the real difference is in how the software is implemented and used.
Digital scientists at the Labo are using:
Consequence 1: you can fail a project with a good piece of software.
Consequence 2: know your needs first. Understand the problem you want to solve the problem or the process you want to improve. Don’t let vendor salespeople define your needs. If nobody in the organization is able to set the frame, the need and the requirements of a given project, it worth hiring a consultant to frame the requirements.
Spending more time on the problem itself and on the business processes upfront can save a tremendous amount of time/money
Consequence 3: don’t spend too much time testing pieces of software. Once you find one that fits 80% of your needs, go for it.
The larger an organization is, the more rigorous the enterprise software deployments need to be, the better the tools should be, the stricter the governance needs to be. Output: better to cut these projects into smaller chunks, with better odds of success
Why do software projects fail ?
- Unclear requirements
- Bad project management
- Unrealistic initial budget and delay (don’t forget to scope the project management and the change management in your budget, not cheap but critical actions for success)
- Leadership commitment
Compliance in remote work implementation
Working from home is not easy, because the routines will be different, and most employees will tend not to apply the same rigour and discipline than in the office.
Compliance with processes is more critical in crisis times than in regular times.
As companies need to adjust and implement new ways of working, it is crucial to deploy them appropriately to increase the chances of compliance.
Clear, simple, and detailed procedures represent only half of the work. What is left after you have created these is:
- communicate: explain the process, train staff
- engage: get the people who will execute the process to give it a try and give feedback
- listen: users will always provide you with a mix of valuable feedback, together with resistance to change, you need to sort these out fairly
- convince: after taking into account the valid feedback, there must be a final agreement on the target business process
Going through these steps increases implementation time, but it will reduce the time needed to control, remind, and retrain. In the end, it is a positive gain.
Remote work mindset
When your team is working from home, they may comply with the rules, but they may not put their full heart into the processes unless they have the right mindset. Procedures avoid mistakes, but they don’t infuse the care required to do a great job.
How do you create the right mindset into a team?
Feedbacks: these are critical for data quality, error correction. They are crucial to fuel continuous improvements to keep up with the business changes.
Visible colour-coded feedback is very powerful, in project status, system health, availability, etc. Humans react to pictures and stories.
Training: it is too frequent, after a system’s initial deployment, to never formally train users again. New employees must attend formal training.
Ownership: the deciding element to set-up the right mindset is the level of ownership of the application into the users’ community.
It took time to get the teams to make it their own, even more during a remote work period.
Evaluation: Each team member in the organization needs to be able to evaluate their own performance against company vision and goals. Working from home and being able to know when you rock it will make any company bulletproof and improve everyone’s happiness.
During the deployment process, be watchful of language. When users refer to YOUR system or OUR system, they have a different mindset. How we name things is not trivial.
The perilous moment when the project team gives the system to the users is called acceptance. Making it only about testing the system is not enough. The users must accept the full ownership, hence the name acceptance.
Start with why, even more during remote work time
Projects often suffer from an ill-defined why statement. There can be confusion between Why, How, and What.
Usually clear the What is clear. These are lists of tasks, deliverables. Notice that most project management tools, applications, and methodologies serve only the What.
An efficient delivery team takes care of the How, crafting the deliverables, to the best of their knowledge, based on the requirements. But things can make a wicked turn there.
Firstly, if the specifications are wrong, the best team will faithfully implement them.
Secondly, we often don’t capture how we build; in other words, there is not enough technical documentation, if any at all.
But, of course, the core issue is the Why. Too many project owners keep it secret, vaguely describe it, mumbling that “we need to stay agile,” leaving the Why open for interpretation. Sounds familiar?
The ‘Why’ is different for each stakeholder (the different reasons for launching a project), so it’s a balancing act of collecting all their ideas and seeing if/how they can be incorporated.
A successful project requires the exact opposite. A clearly defined Why, shared with the team, will create alignment. And so all stakeholders can commit to supporting the final project outcome.
The delivery team will not implement the wrong specifications. And the users will automatically enter the project with the right mindset, towards the right objective.
Time to grow by being digital
A successful enterprise software deployment requires all the following elements to be well balanced
- knowing why you launch this project
- infusing the right mindset in the team
- designing efficient processes
- choosing the softwares that can support the outcome
Quality, budget, time: it is the most popular form of balance that project managers must achieve.
Some say you only can get two out of three. Sorry, to deliver value, you must hit all three targets. To land an aircraft, pilots need to control speed, altitude, and alignment.
Accuracy, satisfaction, change: deliverables must fit the original request, satisfy users, and create change. The tension between user satisfaction and change is evident. The one between initial specifications and user satisfaction rises from users’ ability to envision the result at the inception of the project. It also makes it hard to plan for the changes required at the project kick-off.
Stakeholders: the larger the project, the more stakeholders. The more stakeholders, the more agendas, points of view, and objectives. Identifying and keeping track of these is another balancing act.
We’ll never achieve anything significant without strong project management.