There’s a meme about successful projects initiated by Scott Sehlhorst. Generally the goal is to describe a project which, with your help, ended up as a successful one, especially considering what actually had made the project successful. I was recently pointed by Craig Brown to participate so here it is.
My choice is a worksheet application we use in our company. It’s a simple piece of software where all our technical staff fills which project they were working on during every month. Historically the application forced the user to enter data fine-grained data splitting the work effort done everyday to hours spent on different projects. The intention of the stakeholder was clear – get as much detail as possible to exactly count the project’s cost and profit. Of course to be exact users should fill data daily or every couple of days. They would spend a minute or two everyday on the task. The list of projects was of projects was automatically downloaded from CRM database, to make whole thing more convenient.
That was the theory. The practice was that every month, when reminder was sent by managers (with painful penalties for not filling the data included, which was quite a poor idea by the way), people were facing two options. They either spent whole day or so verifying what they were doing three or four weeks ago (which wasn’t very exact anyway) or they just entered whatever looked more or less reasonable hoping no one would find a fault with them.
That’s not all. Having a list of projects automatically downloaded from CRM database ended up with project list where you could find all the records of potential project we’ve never won (or even have been close to win) and virtually no one in technical department had even a sketch of idea what the heck was that. The list was long enough to create some issues when deciding which project people were actually working on. Several old names, a bunch of projects multiplied in several instances etc.
The situation was that users actually hated the application and it wasn’t bringing expected results anyway.
I did three things.
• I came with my opinion stated just above to decision makers (fortunately I was one of them) and convinced them the solution didn’t work at that moment so we could change it a bit with no pain whatsoever.
• I asked Gosia who was developing the application to make one change – switch from hours-per-day to days-per-month metric. User interface practically didn’t change and we didn’t care about integrity of database as we set up a new one. All changes took Gosia less than a day (or I just believe she is so fast) and I got a simple administering interface to fill official holidays as non-working days as a bonus. Then we officially switched “worksheet filling schedule” from daily to monthly regime, which actually was formalizing the reality but made the task less painful, as expected data was coarse-grained rather than fine-grained.
• The last thing was switching off automatic synchronization with CRM database and cutting off 95% of existing projects from worksheet database manually. That limited the list of projects to active ones only, hopefully improving user experience a bit more. Yes, now I have to add every new project manually into the database, but still that happens once per quarter and wasn’t so heartless to ask Gosia to add that feature as she had quite urgent work to do.
Where’s the success? Users hate the application less, which in this case is a success. We still have to send reminders to get the data filled, but that’s much less of a waste of time as people are forced to enter about 2-3 records on average choosing from 20 possible options instead of 50 out of hundreds of options and, magic happens, information isn’t less precise.
By the way making applications stink less should be in mission statements of many of software companies I know.
To invite a couple of people more to participate: Bruce Henry and Glen Alleman.
Subscribe RSS feed
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe by email
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Interesting!
I’m going to go right over there and take a look at this. It sounds like the same thing that you found in your little time tracking application is the thing that we’ve been building into LiquidPlanner.
I too believe that hours are way too small an increment to use for recording this kind of data. Days are a much better unit. Ideally you would let folks update the items as they did it. That way if they want to do it monthly they can. But if they’re “super-organized” they can do it right then and there.