Chapter 4 - Setting up for success Flashcards
How do we measure success?
Achieving total success will come from the requirements of the many stakeholders. The reason success becomes complicated, is because different stakeholders often have conflicting interests. Some parts wants A while other parts want B. Sometimes A and B are mutually exclusive, which will cause problems.
Regarding stakeholders, what are measures, and what are requirements?
Requirements are basically what the stakeholders want.
Measures are specific means by which the requirements will be measured. We use the measures to determine whether those requirements have been met or not.
Requirements could be something like “I want the end product to perform X amounts better than something else”, or “I want the project environemnt to be a good place to work”.
Measures could be customer satsifaction scores, level of return on investment, etc.
Elaborate on timing in regards to success
Timing is just as important as everything else regarding success.
Projects are evaluated at different times. It so happens that the payout of the project team happens as a result of the immediate result. Therefore, there might not be much incentives to build everlasting solutions, since they will not present any benefits for the PM.
However, it is obvious that it should. Therefore, this must be handled.
What are the two views a PM can have on project success?
1) How much are we going to fail?
2) How much value is going to be delivered?
The negative one is negative. This view focus on minimizing levels of unhappiness. It is not necessarily destructive negative, but it choose the view of every project will fail at certain areas.
The value-maximization view focus more on how the project can maximize the benefits delivered.
How can we begin with the end in mind, and what does this mean?
Beginning with the end in mind means considering the final goals/states that we want to achieve.
We can do this by considering the different stakeholders and their requirements. This gives us a picture of what we should expect, which will help us in treating expectations etc.
What is the meaning of conformance vs performance?
Conformance is about treating TCQ and other related topics as given boundries. Instead, we can for instance as “what is the lowest time we can do this within?”. Or, “What is the best feature we can possible add to this product?”. This cause us to go from conformance to performance.
IMPORTANT: We dont neglect conformance. Conformance is absolutely the starting point, as it involves our objectives. However, it is a very minimalist approach. if we want to do a good job, we need to look at achieving outstanding results. Therefore, we ask ourselves questions on how to do better.
Recall GTO
Givens, tradables, optimizers
Recall TCQ
