Org

Clarity from the start Milestones that are directional Transparency on an ongoing basis Dependency and Risk Management in a pragmatic way

A common tool I see used is via a project kickoff with all stakeholders present and involved.

Given this is an expensive meeting, the person leading the meeting typically prepares an overview about the background ("why"), goals ("what") suggested approach ("how") and end state. Showing off designs or other visuals is a great thing at this stage in order to get through to people who are more visual than textual types.

"Does everyone understand why we are doing this project, how we will get there and what your role will be to help? Raise your hand if the answer is "no" or "maybe" to any of these."

However, people are teams are often late to admit to stakeholders when they come across trouble that they cannot fully mitigate.

A very simple tool I see help in creating this transparency is having a regular, no-BS update on where the team really is.

All team members are part in delivering/writing this update. This serves as a continuous reality check on what is actually happening, close to where the real work is going on: the engineers themselves.

In a team where everyone is aware of how good (or bad) things are going, people will pick up work that can help the team the most.

A lot of business stakeholders don't have much understanding or appreciation of what is easy or hard about software development. By exposing them to more granular details and helping them understand what tradeoffs the team is continuously making helps build empathy and more realistic expectations on both ends.

poor dependency management

This is a symptom of poor risk management.

People practicing things like Scrum or Kanban to also think a lot less of these areas and don't do it early enough.

Discovery. Figure out who your dependencies are and what they need to do. Agreement. Talk to them and agree what they will do and by when. Check-in before the due date. For teams that you don't have a good track record working with, do more frequent check-ins, to make sure they are on track. Give feedback and/or escalate. Once the work is complete, give feedback. If your dependent team did a great job, call this out clearly. If they did not do a good job, consider understanding why. If they are really late, consider escalating earlier, rather than later.

For risk management, have a culture that rewards raising concerns early on and be pragmatic in tradeoffs to mitigate risk.

So when they come across a problem, they see a challenge to solve, not a potential delay to the project.

To tackle this, create a culture of talking about interesting challenges coming up on a day to day basis. Start rewarding people who flag things that might take longer to do and bring tradeoffs to the table.

Whenever risk comes up, consider reacting to it ahead of time.

When we eventually do get things done, looking back and figuring out where we can do better next time is a key part of individual and team growth. And of course, celebrating a big achievement

This last step really helps build a cohesive team who will be ready and hungry to deliver on the next, more complex project, in a way even better than this last one.

A group where every member has the skills, confidence, and empowerment to take initiative, make decisions, and lead others.

As an engineering manager, I am the one accountable and responsible for my team delivering projects. I delegated the responsibility - deciding how to do things - but kept the accountability. If the project would fail, and someone would get in trouble, it would still be me, not the project lead.

Collaboration. Set up a framework for collaboration.Milestones. Break down the project into milestones & provide estimates on these.Communication. Communicate project status to stakeholders.Risks. Manage and call out risks.Delegate. Help the team ship and delegate (both to the team and upwards).Motivation. Motivate the team on the way.Quality. Ensure the overall quality and reliability of the shipped product.

One of the powerful tools I've found leads and teams to hold themselves accountable was a short email status update sent out by the team every week. The update would summarise progress towards the next milestone, how this process changed from last time, and progress the previous week. Risks and delays would explicitly be called out, along with plans to mitigate. This update would be emailed to me, key stakeholders, and all of the team members.

Stakeholders typically care about milestone estimates, evidence on the progress being made towards those estimates. In the case of risks and scope changes, they care about what changes in scope mean for the business. Finally, stakeholders ended up often pinging the project lead directly. This forced the lead to strengthen their stakeholder management skills.

First-time project leads needed to strengthen leadership skills before being thrown into deep water. There are multiple things a project lead needs to do, from facilitating meetings, reporting, calling out risks, coming up with mitigation strategies, and others. Could they start to practice a few of these skills on a project they are not formally leading?

For example, a more junior member started to facilitate the regular standup, getting feedback from the project lead afterward. Preparing for planning meetings, or leading certain stakeholder meetings started to be done by less experienced members - after plenty of preparation, and the project lead being present to support.

Even better, the project lead was strengthening their ability to mentor well

I took a more "prescriptive" approach with first-time project leads, going forward. I suggested them to follow certain processes to the T - kickoff meeting following a template, daily standups, weekly emails based on a template. I asked them to humor this for the first time, and that on their next project, they will be free to choose their tools more freely. Just experience out how these "standard" tools worked, for the duration of the whole project. I put the Checklist for first-time projects part in the guiding document in place at this time.

The perception of the team improved greatly. Stakeholders started to appreciate - and depend on - the weekly status update emails, and loved the transparency these updates provided. Turns out that unexpected delays are easier to work through, when stakeholders trust the team, and understand what happens under the hood.

The approach of engineers owning features end-to-end became more sustainable across the team. In a sprint-based environment, most engineers tend to "forget" about a feature, after development is complete.

This is despite the project far from being complete: rollout, A/B testing and user feedback are still to come - and all these parts carry additional project risk.

As much of the team transitioned to the new project, the project lead was still engaged, looking at usage numbers, figuring out if something needed fixing.

Members of the team saw themselves as leaders, even when not being assigned a project lead role. When interacting with stakeholders, they made decisions on the spot, informing relevant parties.

Likely related to professional growth, very few people decided to leave the team. Those who did, moved to teams owning domains they had more interest in, quickly becoming a goto person on their new teams as well.

Smaller, one-person side-projects were also an area I experimented with. For those who were eager to lead, I suggested we treat one of the smaller things they worked on as a project. I assigned a mentor to them, to make it a two-person team, and asked them to follow the usual expectations, from having a kickoff, incremental milestones, and weekly updates. You might think this was an overkill. Perhaps so, but the people doing this loved it - and improved their leadership skills on a small, non-critical project.

This was the point where I began suggesting that people take on ownership on parts of the project: specifically, project leads delegating smaller parts.

I also tried to "mix and match" parallel projects, so larger and smaller efforts would be better balanced.

The time-consuming part of planning and resourcing projects was the main downside of this approach. I found myself and our product manager becoming the bottleneck in planning out who will work on what project, next, and who will be the lead. Initially, I did not mind: the payoff and professional growth for team members made up for a bit of extra time spent here. As the team is growing, we'll have to decide if we keep this structure, with smaller teams, or not.

But I want to code, not do project management…" Early on, a few engineers expressed worry that I'm asking them to do project management. "Isn't that what project managers are for?" - they asked.

Or they do the project management - doing so with autonomy, and learn a new skill. Do as little project management they'd like to, as long as we have a way to know where we are, and if we are on track.

Instead, start working on new things when you aren’t Planning. Document what you want to do/build/etc. Share the proposal with people. Get their explicit buy-in to support the new thing.  Test your assumptions and estimates with people in your organization with expertise that are different from yours. Get feedback from leadership about whether your idea is aligned with the direction of the organization (or if they’re willing to change directions). Tell people how much it’s going to cost: in terms of people assigned to it, time to iterate on it, to break through the noise in the market and educate your target customers, etc. Solicit internal interest for people who would be interested to join the effort if it gets approved.  This is a Funding Proposal, and it’s a great process to run outside of Planning.

The other option that also works well for a large class of ideas: just try them. Don’t ask for resources, don’t ask for support from other teams, do the quick and dirty test to validate or disprove your idea, build a thing knowing that you’ll probably fail and be ready to back out your changes and throw it away.  That’s a great alternative to doing a real plan. It’s the middle zone, where we pretend to plan, but do it badly, that gets us into trouble.

% of the company who adopts a product once it’s available, etc.

An investment portfolio approach is a framework. 20% of our effort should be going to brand new efforts that are high risk and high reward. The number of people it takes to operate our mature products should decrease 20% YoY even as usage grows.

they need to be constraints people know going into Planning.

These are things you should be tracking throughout the year, but if you aren’t, setting aside some time before planning to get these answers is important.

As the person designing Planning, encourage people to build their plans on the foundation of things that are already working and shipped. New capabilities, and building support and excitement for them should be done via Funding Proposals outside this process (see “Planning is the wrong time to introduce anything new.”)