I recently co-led a workshop at the Digital PM Summit in Orlando, along with my colleague Sally who runs our project management team, on the topic of effectively transitioning projects from sales to project management. It was a fantastic experience, with roughly 50 project managers from diverse backgrounds collaborating to tackle what was obviously a common challenge.
Maintaining a consistent, weekly meeting to review progress over the life of a project is one important way to keep things on track.
Around a year ago, we discovered meetings had become a leading culprit for killing time. So we implemented the "no-meetings-days" concept in order to prioritize deep thinking and important solo work.
Every client has direct access to their project team within Aten. We've found that collaborating in this way allows our team to develop deep, personal connections with our clients, understand how to best engage their stakeholders and ultimately, build empathy for their users.
Agile is gaining popularity with many agencies and large corporations as a means to become more efficient in the software development lifecycle and increase client satisfaction. Agile efficiency comes from reducing waste, mitigating risks early on, delivering working software quickly, and adapting to ever-changing requirements at the drop of a dime.
We helped Nashville Public Library (NPL) relaunch www.limitlesslibraries.org, the latest project in a multi-year collaboration between Aten and NPL.
The last time you ordered a latte, did the barista tell you it would be between three and five dollars? Of course not! So why should website price tags be different? To answer that question, let’s consider the cost of something more familiar–a road trip.
Aten uses Harvest for time tracking. It’s a great tool with a robust search interface for time entries, plenty of ways to group and output data, and lots of integrations with other project management tools. You can also use the CSV data that Harvest outputs to build out your own reporting tools using Google Sheets.
"When will it be done?" As a digital project manager, I hear this all the time. While it's a perfectly reasonable question, the problem is I don't have a crystal ball, and I also want to set expectations properly. By using a Monte Carlo analysis to project a timeline, I can spark an important dialogue about resourcing and risk, as opposed to the one-way conversation that often occurs with a flat timeline.
If your team isn’t doing retrospectives regularly, here’s what happens: at the end of the project, you gather your team to select, debate, and document the hard-won lessons you learned throughout the course of the work. Fantastic! Insights are mined and polished, and everyone leaves the meeting feeling cathartic. But what happens next? Before you begin your next project, are you likely to pore over the lessons? Frame and hang them above your cubicles? If your team is like mine, probably not — we’re busy.
