A few words about the project diary

    Confucius once said: "an intelligent man learns from his own experience, a sage - from a stranger." In this article I will try to take another step towards the “smart person” and share how you can accumulate your experience during the project.

    It is known that stepping on a rake is painful, offensive and unpleasant. However, if the rake is in a completely unexpected place, they have just been left there, and in the yard is a deep night and not a damn thing is visible, this is permissible. To step on the rake for the second time is not only painful insulting and unpleasant, but also ashamed.

    How not to step on a rake to a project manager? The question, in fact, is not obvious. It is clear that there is no universal cure for this. The first and easiest option is "it will come with experience." That is why experience is a very valuable resource, the loss of which must be minimized. One of such ways to maximally save experience from past projects I actively apply and now I will describe it to you. It is called the project diary.

    What do I mean by “project diary”


    So, first we decide what is at stake. By a project diary, I mean an absolutely trivial thing - a table in which I write down significant events that arise during the project. I record both my decisions and events that, in my opinion, have an impact on the course of the project. For instance:
    • Gave Vasya the task of analytics. Hope that works out well. In this case, I can concentrate on managing and interacting with the customer, and partially delegate analytics to him
    • Sent Vasya on an unplanned vacation for 2 weeks. The decision was made spontaneously, looking at his exhausted look. This will delay the project a little, but increase Vasya’s working capacity.
    • The application was approved by Apple, but was withdrawn at the initiative of the customer due to errors in section X. Errors were found on our QA during the testing process, but I decided not to consider them critical and release the application ( author note: yes, I am ashamed about this remember, but the fact was )
    • Impressed customers and received a bonus

    In general, it can be seen that most of the entries are a description of my decisions with comments about their effectiveness. And it is clear that most of the decisions are erroneous.

    Record structure


    Each entry consists of four columns: date, description, category and conclusions.

    Description - this is an expanded text, where several sentences describe the fact that arose during the project. Examples of descriptions are given in the previous section.

    Category is the simplest classification of events. I actually have three of them: win, fail and "???". Obviously, the first one says that the decision or factor was successful, the second one shows that we “flew” because of this decision, and in the case of the third category, I have not yet decided whether to consider this event successful. The draw category is sometimes found (the event did not affect the project in any way), but it rarely appears.

    It happens that a record from one category wanders to another. For example, the entry “Gave the green light to refactoring section X. We'll see if the 40 hours it has to pay off” wandered from the fail category, when refactoring dragged on for two weeks, to the win category, when they got a clean and tidy version, which was immediately handed over to the customer, saving a lot of time on bug fixes in the initially "plasticine" implementation.

    Or, even more clearly: "I continue to delay the team until late on the days of deployments" at first it had the category win, because we did it in a short time and received a significant bonus from customers (of course, the team was pleased with the high premium). Immediately after that, one of the key developers began to frankly “slip” from scratch, and it became obvious that he “burned out”. I had to send him on vacation, and the project dragged on much more than we could if we worked “smoothly” all the time. As a result, the fact of delaying the team at night migrated from win to fail.

    Conclusions - in my opinion, the most important column. Here I try to describe to the fullest extent possible what results the event brought about, and what conclusions I need to draw from this. This, of course, is the most difficult.

    In general, the conclusions can be the simplest and most obvious, for example, “It is necessary to store documents in the version control system”,

    author’s note: this entry appeared after I accidentally overwritten the file with iteration estimates and had to restore them for half a day .

    On the other hand, the output can take many lines, such as: “At the stage of analysis, you need to require examples of how the result should look. This encourages the customer to think through what he wants to get. The same is true for changes: apparently, you can’t start work until the interface is approved. It does not make sense to rely on textual descriptions (especially bad ones) - you always need a picture. ”

    Author’s note: we are talking about insufficiently developed textual specifications for changing a part of the system, which we hurriedly accepted, believing that the customer knew the best. Then, after implementing the first version, it turned out that the customer wanted something completely different, but did not write it. I had to breed a long (and, thank God, successful) diplomacy with the customer with the conviction that he, in fact, wants something completely different, and not what he wrote .

    A few words in conclusion


    My last project, which took several thousand man hours, had a five-page diary. Rereading it, I am sometimes horrified how I could allow this or that stupidity, which, naturally, entailed serious consequences. But, if you are completely honest with yourself and regularly re-read what you wrote, not allowing yourself to attribute the failures to external factors, then it is entirely possible to avoid such mistakes in the future. I really hope so.

    PS I want to emphasize that the examples may be fictitious, and the coincidences are random.

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