Why do we hang a television in the office?

Recently, in our Smolensk office, at the very visible place, a big TV appeared. What for?

The fact is that we are engaged in the development of sites and want to release projects in the promised time in the contract. And who does not want this? They want everything - both studios and customers, but it just turns out that it does not work ... The customer cannot timely coordinate the work or send materials, the studio has resources overloaded at the right time, etc. As a result - the failure of the contract. And the most annoying thing is that you don’t have time to do it anyway. But this is not normal, it should not be so.

We have been dealing with this issue for a long time, experimenting with different approaches. And here he is one of them - TV. How he helps us meet deadlines - this is a little story.

Why is it important to deliver projects on time?

The main task of the project manager is to meet the deadline and allocated budget. In the segment of exclusive development, where there are not many parallel projects, this task is not so acute and is solved by simply taking into account the time spent and control of the project at all stages.
')
In streaming production, everything is different. Timing is compressed, and resources are limited. Delay on any of the projects - jeopardizes the timely implementation of other projects. The queue is growing, and with it growing customer dissatisfaction. In this state, you can not work, and it was necessary to urgently seek a solution.

What did we have and why is this not enough?

Monitoring compliance with standards. Initially for us it was the main task, because we work in an inexpensive price range. N hours are allocated for the project and we must meet them. If 70% of the projects fit into the standards, then we have worked well. At the end of each month, we summarized the results of the submitted projects, discussed the results and optimized the approaches. Automation of many processes, accumulated by that time, experience of developers and strict adherence to technology - allowed us to reach the required indicators and keep within the budget of projects. It turned out not so difficult. We already wrote about this.

The task of meeting the deadlines . The number of projects and managers grew. We are faced with the problem of meeting deadlines. According to the standards, development should take 5-10 days, depending on the type of site.
With a large flow of projects, managers spent more time on switching between projects than on working directly on projects and controlling deadlines. As a result, the developers were engaged in not the projects that had to be dealt with. Who is the most of the customers calling, the project is being done) Familiar? In general, the deadlines were violated.

We really wanted to raise a plan for the implementation of the contractual deadlines of the projects. A matter of honor, as they say.

Project monitoring and prioritization. At the initial stage, we identified one big problem - there is no uniform system of priorities that would tell which projects to do. Having finished our system of commercial accounting of projects, we made a section “project monitoring”. She was pretty simple. All projects were grouped by managers and sorted by the onset of the deadline. The manager goes from top to bottom and consistently deals with one project after another, setting and controlling tasks in redmine (task manager).
It helped, but partially. There was a problem with the distribution of developer resources among managers and the inability to quickly respond to the emerging delays.

Unified information center and resource synchronization. We needed a single resource synchronization center, not only managerial, but also production. Designers, designers, programmers - everyone should be aware of what is now in production, what are the priorities, what are the real deadlines. We set this task at the forefront.

We decided to buy a TV in the office. We wrote a simple application to our system of commercial accounting of projects and brought it to the general screen. The principle of operation is simple. All projects with the status “In Work” are displayed on the screen. Depending on the proximity of the project to the deadline - it is painted in one of three colors. Green - the project is no more than 30% closer to the contractual deadline, yellow - less than 30% of the project’s duration is left before the project is completed, red - today must be surrendered or deadlines for delivery are missed. Information is updated every 5 minutes.



The project fell into the red zone. What to do? Firstly, it is very bad. Attention to all who are now involved in this project. If the developers assigned to this project, at this moment do other tasks, then they (tasks) are suspended and the forces rush to the "red" project. Of course, the task of the manager is to prevent the project from falling into the red zone, but you know, this is not always the case. Thus, the colored zones on the screen are a clear indication to the developers and managers about the current production priorities.

At first everything was red. Yes, it began with the fact that a bunch of projects were in the red zone. The worst thing is to get used to it. Therefore, one of the first tasks is to prevent this. Part of the projects was delayed due to coordination with clients, in connection with which deadlines were delayed. At the suggestion of the managers, an additional status was introduced - “under approval”, into which they transfer the project in case a response or confirmation from the client is required. The days (or hours) spent in this status are not counted by the system as workers, and the client is notified that the project is in the status of “under approval”. If the client does not respond for a long time, we transfer the project to “suspended” and we can always explain later on how long the deadlines were delayed and for what reason.

What is the result? Now we can say for sure that we have received a tool for quick monitoring of real terms and the possibility of a quick response to their delay. Bonus we received a tool for collective responsibility to the client. Prior to that, only managers felt responsible. We will see quantitative results in a couple of months, which we will definitely write about. We plan that no more than 20% of the projects will go into the red zone.

Have a great week everyone!

Vasily Churanov and the Web-canape team