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Define the Milestones and Handoffs - Terms

May 10, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: HR Management, Communications Management

Define the Milestones and Handoffs - Terms (#3 in the series Managing Multicultural Projects with Complementary Practices)
By Johanna Rothman

Development practices don’t have to identical for every group, but the outputs of each group must match the expectations of the other groups. This matching of expectations reflects complementary practices among the project groups.

The first thing I do as a project manager on a multicultural project is to agree on the meaning of important terms and milestones.

Terms

Project terms vary from team to team as much as practices do. Many teams have their own interpretations of terms such as fix, verify, feature freeze, code complete. You don’t have to be part of a multilanguage team to have trouble with terms.

I once managed a second-line support group for a globally dispersed team, in which there was some confusion about the term “fixed”. The job of the Boston-based group was to fix the defects that the first-line support group could not fix and that were time-critical for our customers. We had a recurring problem with two of our European first-line support groups. The Europeans repeatedly promised imminent fixes to very high profile customers, because they thought the defects were fixed. However, the defect fixes were not complete. The Boston group was using the notation “Fix” for defects that had been investigated, the cause known, and a fix was in test. “Verify” was the notation for completed fixes. It never occurred to our European counterparts that “Fix” was not truly fixed.

Other terms some teams have found confusing are any project milestones containing the words “freeze” or “complete”, such as feature freeze, code freeze, and code complete. I once worked on a project where the US developers thought code complete was the first time they froze the code to create a build. The Russian developers thought code complete was the last freeze to create the final build to generate the master production CD. The technical leads kept arguing during schedule development, until they realized they weren’t using the same terms.

Original article can be found at: http://www.jrothman.com/Papers/Multiculturalprojects.html

Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. Johanna is the author of Manage It!’Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management’. She is the coauthor of the pragmatic Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management, and author of the highly acclaimed Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People. And, Johanna is a host and session leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference (http://www.ayeconference.com). You can see Johanna’s other writings at http://www.jrothman.com.

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