Project Managers are responsible for the good health of Widgilabs Projects. But what does that mean? It means the project is well defined, has a roadmap, tasks are assigned to developers, project scope and budget is well maintained and finally both team and clients are happy. Clients do get regular updates and communication is clear and effective.

Projects are run in sprints of 2 weeks and the following activities should be considered during a project life cycle.

Activities during a project:

• Project is created on Jira
  
• Backlog is created based on the project scope depending on what is defined on the proposal
  
• Roadmap with milestones should be created
  
• Internal kick-off with the team where team members are familiarised with the project and the backlog is reviewed ( high level, there is no need to go into detail ). Here the most critical points must be identified and there should be a plan to address them. The roadmap should also be reviewed by the team members
  
• Roadmap is shared with the client
  
• Before Sprint Planning the sprint should be prepared. Each dev has 5points a day to accomplish which is the allocation expected for each team member. Preparing a sprint is to have on the sprint the mandatory tasks that need to be accomplished during that sprint, so that team can estimate them, if the number of points did not match 5/day per each dev then we can get more tasks from the backlog.
  
• Tasks don’t need to be assigned to a team member but must be assigned to the team Frontend or Backend. The person that gets the tasks should be ideally the more familiarised with the project.
  
• On sprint planning tasks are estimated in points and the team validates other team member estimation
  
• PM should run daily scrums where the following 3 questions are made:
  
  • What did you do yesterday?
  • What are you working on today?
  • Do you have anything blocking you?
• If dev has something blocking, the PM should do whatever needs to be done to remove that blocking. PM should also validate if the goal for that day is around the 5 points
  
• PM should review tasks marked as in review. Each project has a staging environment so the PM when a task is in review should test it on staging and if it’s successfully tested the task should move to the done column and the dev should be notified merge is pull request. If the test fails task should go to the TO Do column again and a description of what happened should be added
  
• Regular checkpoints should be scheduled with the customer to share progress, staging environment can be shared with him to keep track of the development
  
• Customers should be informed of any delays as soon as possible, to manage expectations, more time or less time to deploy can be negotiated with more or fewer features
  
• After the cycle sprints once project is ready on staging client should be informed that he has one week (check with Nuno) for testing and a go live that should be scheduled
  
• Project Goes live
  
• Client is informed about the start of the warranty period, client should also receive brochure for the maintenance plans
  
• Once the warranty period finish client must be notified, if he did not choose any plan we should follow up on that
  
• Do a training session with the client, record it and share with the client
• Do a close project meeting
  • What was agreed
  • What was done
  • What was done on top
  • What went bad
  • What went well

In summary:

• Activity and resource planning
• Organizing and motivating a project team
• Controlling time management
• Cost estimating and developing the budget
• Ensuring customer satisfaction
• Analyzing and managing project risk
• Monitoring progress
• Managing reports and necessary documentation

Back to: Project Management