Blog

By Veronica Thraen / January 4, 2022

It’s the start of a new year and, for many of us, that means new projects, new goals, and new challenges. But what did project teams learn from last year’s projects that can set them up for success this year?

I reached out to 8 colleagues with various roles and experiences to get insight into the challenges they’ve faced and tips for improving their project or product delivery going forward.

Here’s what they had to say:

Project Managers / Scrum Masters

What is your biggest challenge during a project?

• Identifying streamlined ways to communicate with the teams to ensure everyone understands the strategy and project status.
• Knowing when to appropriately empower and coach teams and/or communicate any concerns with them.

What does the team do well during a project?

• Collaborating as a team with the help of a respected and trusted development lead who incorporates everyone into technical discussions and decision-making.
• Solving any problems that come up.

How can team members help Project Managers / Scrum Masters do a better job?

Product Managers / Product Owners can:

• Share and collaborate on the roadmap/vision and customer challenges so that the team can solve the problems together.
• Work together to set expectations with customers.
• Help logically order the features/user stories on a frequent basis and provide customer requests incrementally (slices rather than layers of cake).

Business Analysts / QA can:

• Look at the entire business process as well as tools.
• Appropriately communicate new work requirements, explain any nuances, and provide thorough documentation.
• Provide acceptance criteria, including detailed examples, as well as scriptable acceptance criteria for automated testing.

Engineers / Developers can:

• Rely on Project Managers to assist with roadblocks, escalations and managing expectations rather than view them as a hindrance.
• Jump in on the same user story during a sprint so that everyone can see the problem and solve it together.
• Be open and honest about any technical limitations.

Product Managers / Product Owners

What is your biggest challenge during a project?

• Making sure that everyone understands the end goal.
• Making forward progress without distractions on Engineering / Development (e.g., support tickets) that cause delays.

What does the team do well during a project?

• Solving any problems that arise.
• Recognizing the priorities they should be working on and focusing without too many distractions.

How can team members help Product Managers / Product Owners do a better job?

Project Managers / Scrum Masters can:

• Consistently document meetings, including critical decisions and action items with due dates and assignments, and help identify any risks and dependencies.
• Collect and provide feedback from other departments to help break down silos. 

Business Analysts / QA can:

• Work together to build requirements to ensure a consistent vision.

Engineers / Developers can:

• Be up front about any technical limitations.
• Limit distractions by assigning a technical lead or manager to work with Product Managers.

Engineers / Developers

What is your biggest challenge during a project?

• Getting ambiguous requirements instead of having the full scope to prevent a lot of “redo.”.
• Having aggressive timelines and too many distractions.

What does the team do well during a project?

• Keeping stakeholders up to date on technical issues and risks.
• Having an open culture that enables effective collaboration.
• Breaking down projects into smaller deliverable increments.

How can team members help Engineers / Developers do a better job?

Project Managers / Scrum Masters can:

• Be more flexible with Scrum practices (one size does not fit all) and ensure continued focus by limiting distractions.
• Understand the domain/product and scope to effectively guide the team and manage vendor and cross functional team dependencies.

Product Managers / Product Owners can:

• Provide more than just the “big picture” but not so much detail where they are providing implementation direction.
• Continually share customer feedback to be sure that customer needs are being met. 

Business Analysts / QA can:

• Enable a greater focus on coding and delivering a quality product by providing any pertinent data or systems analysis.
• Provide a full understanding of the problem rather than implementation or design direction.

Business Analysts / QA

What is your biggest challenge during a project?

• Constantly changing requirements.
• Misunderstanding the role of a Business Analyst.

What does the team do well during a project?

• Bringing a wealth of knowledge and subject matter expertise to simplify the requirements needed to successfully accomplish business goals.
• Keeping singularly focused and motivated to achieve the same goal.

How can team members help Business Analysts / QA do a better job?

Project Managers / Scrum Masters can:

• Take on more task follow-up responsibilities to alleviate some pressure. 

Product Managers / Product Owners can:

• Provide adequate success criteria for testing.

Engineers / Developers can:

• Help identify technical challenges early on to ensure successful overall project delivery.

Based on these results, the opportunities for improvement include limiting distractions and ensuring everyone is on the same page with the strategy/goal. Passing on customer feedback and managing their expectations, as well as identifying technical challenges ahead of time, were also mentioned.

Clearly, effective communication between all team members is critical for project success. From Project and Product Managers to Business Analysts and Engineers/Developers, understanding the “who, what, when and how” of communication is key to improving the way teams work together in 2022 and beyond.