It was nice to hear why someone else would blog about project management, why they would engage others on Twitter, or who they thought was interesting in the project management community.
We talked; we laughed; we shared stories. What I found most intriguing was we weren’t all that different.
If you ever get a chance to attend a Tweetup, I say go for it! It’s not like one of those swarmy networking events where someone you’ve never met walks up to you and hands you a business card. These are people you’ve interacted with before. You all have a similar interest. You’re not there to sell anything. You go, have a few drinks, and enjoy the company. It was really nice to shake their hands, making that direct connection. Though I enjoying singing praises of people on #FollowFriday or tweeting back and forth, it doesn’t top meeting them in person.
I hope I didn’t talk to much. I get so excited, I sometimes can’t help myself. Next time, I won’t drink the pot of coffee and will just listen. Thank you Joseph, Jhaymee, and Michiko for a wonderful night. And thank you again, Joseph, for picking up the tab!
Today was a very interesting day. It was the first day our team had been together in a week. The DC FedGov closures have really rattled people. As contractors and consultants, we are not Government employees. We play by different rules. Depending on your contract, if the FedGov is closed, you may not get paid.
For those working under a corporate umbrella, where paid time off is offered as a benefit, this has left a lot of people very unhappy. Without an opportunity to work from home, some were asked to take paid time off or leave without pay. Either way, it hurts.
I can see both sides of the coin and empathize with both. From a contract holder perspective, if they compensated each of their employees the 4 days the Federal offices were closed, it could do irreparable harm to the bottom line.
From the contractor and consultant side, there are feelings of desperation and abandonment. I heard story after story about vacations being canceled or accepting a day without pay because they felt there was no other choice. 32 hours of the rainy day fund just left their accounts and there isn’t a damned thing anyone can do about it. The lack of control has put many on tilt.
Listening to people speak their minds, some had real rancorous opinions of the situation. I’d like to think there is a happy ending in all this and it will all work out in the end. Unfortunately, there is snow in the forecast next week.
Washington DC is in the process of getting 20-30 inches of snow, over the next 24 hours. The forecast hasn’t changed all week. If anything, it’s gotten worse! At no time did the weather service say this weather event was going to miss us. The Beltway has been in the cross-hairs of this system since the computer models discovered its formation. That leads me to write about risks and opportunities. Actually, for today, it’s just risks. When working on a larger project, you should always have a discovery session early on that will capture potential risks and opportunities. Once these events are identified, you should quantify their values. You’ll also want to capture the probability of each.
Once you’ve captured a risk (or opportunity), its value, and its probability, you’ll know better if you’ll be planning acceptance, avoidance, mitigation, or transference. I’ll save that process and definitions for a later time. Right now, I want to talk about snow.
Yesterday at the meeting I hosted, we discussed our contingency plan for today. Even before the meeting, we knew we were going to get hit with this weather system and it would impact the schedule. This was no longer a risk but an issue. The issue was relevant because our vendor has a contract deliverable due today. Inclement weather was not annotated in their risk register so it was up to us tell them how this would play out.
Though I know you can’t foresee all possible issues which may occur over the course of a project, you should make an honest attempt to identify them in order to open a dialog with your stakeholders. Local schools systems plan for snow days. They have documented strategies to deal with these events because they’ve learned their lessons. Shouldn’t your projects as well?
This snow storm is going to mess with a lot of people and a lot of projects, over the course of the next few days. I hope we all learn a lesson from it.
Has weather ever delayed your project or pushed it over budget? I would love to hear about it.
On our current project, we have over 100 people across 14 Scrum teams. The challenge? How do you communicate between Scrum teams? Well, that all depends. What are the dependencies between the teams? Though I could write a 1000+ word post about this, I figured I would just link to a short but informative video. In it, you’ll see Mike Cottmeyer talk about scaling Scrum and how you might have different types of scrum-of-scrums (the way you would communicate between Scrum teams). Mike is a Product Consultant and Agile Evangelist at VersionOne. You can read more from Mike on his blog, Leading Agile, or on the VersionOne blog, Agile Chronicles. I’m hoping if all goes well, we’ll be bringing Mike to Washington DC to offer a few days of training. I’m sure this will be one of the many important topics to cover.
Project Management | Derek Huether | March 11, 2010 | 
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