Creating a project management system at Yandex Tolstoy Camp

In the intervals between the development of mobile solutions for large customers, the ideas of new services constantly come to mind. In order not to postpone their implementation indefinitely, we decided to give ourselves in the ass and were selected in Yandex Tolstoy Startup Camp 2014.

We are working on creating a new project management system. The main goal is to develop a tool that will help small studios to more accurately evaluate projects, reduce the risks of projects getting out of schedule and budget, and see the picture of what is happening more fully.


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If you heard about Lean Startup, you should also know about Customer Development - an approach that forces startups not to sit and silently saw a brilliant product for six months, but to go to their potential customers right away, look for their real problems and solve them. So, since the users of Habr are our potential target audience, we will test our hypotheses about problems for you. We will regularly make posts about how we are developing, which hypotheses were confirmed, and which were refuted, how our product vision changed during the casting and how much money we saved compared to the usual approach (write the code!) , well, talk about Lean Startup and Customer Development.

So, if you are a project manager or CTO, you want to take part in an interview and express your opinion on how your dream project management system should look like, or just want to see how customer development works in a startup from the inside - welcome under cat.

Many, having heard the phrase “new project management system”, will probably think - how does it differ from existing tools like JIRA, Redmine, Asana, Megaplan and many others. From our point of view, all these systems are good, but can hardly be called “project management systems”, since they cover only a few of the processes that occur in the project (examples of such processes are task evaluation, development of a hierarchical work structure, control and management cost of the project; there are others. Task trackers, as their name implies, cover part of the management of tasks several other processes - reporting, quality control).

We want to create a system that will cover a lot more processes. What for? I hope that the answer to this question will become clear both to you and to us =) from our further publications.

Problems...

Consider a small studio that develops mobile or web applications to order. Usually, each project of such a studio is divided into several steps:

1. collect customer requirements, initial assessment and sales;
2. after signing the contract - the phase of analysis and design. By the end of this phase, the customer receives a more or less accurate work breakdown with an indication of the components of the program being developed, supported by use cases, with a price placed opposite each element. The format of this document is usually a Word or Excel file:
   

   Component / Functionality	Design	Development	Testing
   Login	50	150	75
   start page	100	500	200

   
   The project manager knocks out the necessary resources for the project, understands the relationship between the tasks, so in addition to the assessment document, the customer can be provided with a project plan in the form of a Gantt chart, drawn up, for example, in Microsoft Project.
3. After the final approvals begins, in fact, work on the project. The project manager initiates tasks in a task tracker (for example, JIRA); the first sprint starts, if the team works on scrum; are happy working days.

... and danger

From our point of view, such projects face the following dangers:

• At the assessment stage, no risk assessment is performed. More precisely, each participant in the assessment process multiplies the figure that first came to mind by 2 (and an experienced appraiser - by 4), but nobody really knows what these risks are and whether they need to be increased / decreased for this project.
• This approach makes it difficult to negotiate with the customer, since sales are hard to understand how much it can reduce the initial price before the project ceases to be profitable. As a result, the company offers a price higher than its competitors and loses a potential client.
• Artifacts created as a result of the assessment rarely fall into the track tracker in the same form in which they were presented to the customer. This makes it difficult to calculate the actuals for each developed feature (screen, use case) separately and does not make it clear whether we can afford to spend more time on it or not.
• PM has to regularly and manually synchronize information in the bug tracker, project plan, reports that it sends to the company’s management and customers. It often happens that the items in Excel, for which he reports to the customer, have nothing to do with the task list in the tracker (see point above), and the preparation of each such report requires a lot of effort to understand what percentage of this or that another part of the functional.
• PM doesn’t have an understanding of how many real risks were put into the assessment and after reaching which fact figures the project works at a loss (well, or simply reduces the project's marginality)

Do you encounter such problems? How do you solve them? We will be glad to your feedback on this topic in the comments to the post. Also, please take a few minutes and complete the survey .

We will be especially grateful to those who agree to spend 30-40 minutes of their time on a Skype interview. To do this, simply register on the site www.snapyourproject.com and tick "contact me" - and we will come for you. If you live and work in Moscow, we will be happy to meet with you in person to get your opinion.