• Read more about Our Project Management Process, The Mobomo Way

The Mobomo Way

You can think of your project manager as your liaison and main point of contact. Here’s what you can expect from them in terms of communication:

As project managers, one of the key concepts we discuss with our clients during the project kickoff is the “iron triangle”, or “triple constraint.” Both of these terms directly relate to the scope, cost, and schedule of a project. Think about the scope, cost, and schedule as the three edges, surrounding quality. If any one of these edges falls short, the entire quality of the project is affected. Thus, the importance of project management to keep all sides of your project on track!

Another key concept which we practice at Mobomo, we embrace Scrum — and, we’re all Certified Scrum Masters! If you’re unsure of what we mean by Scrum, we’re not talking rugby here.

Scrum is an Agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum originally was formalized for software development projects, but it works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless.

Generally speaking, Scrum allows us to…

While it might sound too good to be true, Scrum is deceptively simple! Here are some key pieces of the Scrum process you’ll hear about and be involved in (if you’d like)...

Now that we’ve talked about the key pieces of our process and methodology, let’s chat tools! The following are tools that you’ll have access to with us throughout your project…

Do you have a project or a question about our project management process? Get in touch so we can get started!

• Read more about Project Management: Life Pro Tips

Do you ever wonder how you can stay on top of the newest technology? Or what the next big thing will be? We asked some of our project managers for their recommendations, how they stay on top of technology and how they integrate the changing technologies into their everyday routine. Here are their top agile project management tips and life hacks:

Browser extensions

Browser extensions can be added to make your tedious tasks online into simpler, more efficient and personalized ways of working. Think of extensions as an army of little helpers for your professional and recreational online activity - remember, extensions are here to help you!

Font Face Ninja (Chrome, Safari) - details on any text in a browser screen, mask mode hides anything that is not text

Page Ruler (Chrome) - Measure anything in the browser screen to see it’s dimensions, this is handy for designers and developers

Google Docs Offline (Chrome) - Edit Google docs and sheets offline to then be synced once connection is established

Muzli 2 (Chrome, Safari) - For a new window or tab default page, this loads lots of digital design inspiration and resources

Software and Programs

In Project Management - communication is the cornerstone to high-quality performance. Whether it communication to clients, developers or other teammates, these tools help in every step of the process:

Jira - Clone tool - when working with multiple platforms on a project this tool can help replicate the same stories to different components, or platforms.

Slack - This communication program is incredibly useful to help speed up quick communication between teams, client user integration in specific channels, and easy file sharing.

Google Hangouts - Need an impromptu chat or video call? A quick scrum? Jump on a hangout to keep communication going.

Appear.in - Great impromptu conference call and video chat service hosted completely in the web browser. Provides a common web address, such as appear.in/mobomo that can be forwarded quickly and even password protected if needed.

Strategy

Project Stacks - It can be difficult to work outside of our comfort zone on some projects. However there are often new technologies, techniques, programs, and methods available to be utilized in a project. It is important in the industry to push limits and be on top of emerging technologies and techniques. In order to explore these opportunities in a timely and organized/structured methodology, projects can be run specifically and purposefully using these technologies and/or techniques. Little microcosms of experimental project setups that explore these potentially beneficial project components.

An example could be utilizing a new project management tool like Trello to run the project stories and sprints, while simultaneously utilizing a complementary tool like Wunderlist that integrates. This could become a very nice strategic stack and otherwise may not have been explored.

In short, keep pushing boundaries and stay agile; not only in your projects, but in your approach to projects.

Did you miss tips to keep a project on budget?

• Read more about Tips For Keeping A Project On Budget

As a project manager at a mobile app development company, we talk a lot about the “iron triangle”, or “triple constraint.” Both of these terms directly relate to the scope, cost, and schedule of a project. Think about the scope, cost, and schedule as the three edges, surrounding quality. When one edge lacks the triangle becomes incomplete, resulting in quality drastically suffering. Easy enough, right? One of the easiest ways to break that triangle and for a project’s quality to be negatively impacted is through budget; it is crucial for the project manager to control budget from an internal and external perspective.

Let’s take a look at what that actually means, and how you can effectively manage your project’s budget.

Define & Forecast

This will likely occur during the discovery phase of your project, this is when your project manager discovers what your company (or your client) can afford in terms of budget. This phase goes hand-in-hand with the estimation process. Combining a variety of estimating techniques will help in order to provide the most accurate estimate. First, you must define your project and the deliverables you will provide at the end of the project. When estimating line items, we recommend getting technical expert judgment from someone who has worked on a similar project, comparing and learning from other projects, estimating core costs first (team, equipment, storage, servers, etc.) and then moving up to those more abstract items afterward.

Choose a Program for Budget Management

Thomas Carlyle says that “without tools [man] is nothing” - and in this case, it’s true. As humans, we’re prone to all sorts of errors especially when it comes to number crunching. Choosing the right tool, such as Harvest, Liquid Planner, SmartSheet, Punchtime or even a fancy Excel/Google Sheets with all sorts of formulas will do the trick! We recommend a program such as Harvest or Punchtime to track employee hours and plan for upcoming work.

Update & Review Allocations Regularly

That’s right - review, review and review again. Not even the most meticulous software project managers will be able to accurately forecast hours and keep a team on track throughout a project without a regular review of budget and resource allocations. Say one team member worked an extra 10 hours last week to finish a task.. Whoops. There goes your budget for the month! Without a regular review of schedule, scope and budget, you’ll lose track quickly. If you notice your project is regularly going over-schedule, it might be time to chat with your client and/or project stakeholders about increasing budget.

Manage Scope & Schedule 

There is no better way to blow a budget than by scope creep and consequential schedule changes. Project managers must be vigilant from the beginning of the project, and they should understand the client’s vision and requirements for the project. Project managers should include a process for any changes in scope, if any changes occur the project manager should communicate to the client how any changes will impact the budget. If you monitor scope and the project schedule, you will be more in control of your overall budget.

Communicate to your Project Team

Communication is KEY to any piece of agile project management., communicating allows project managers to set and maintain expectations so that there are no surprises. If you are going to be a bit over budget due to client requests, new features, etc., you must communicate to avoid a surprise when it comes to invoicing. If your team is consistently working over-time, meet with your project team to find out the root of the problem. You’ll be amazed at what can come out of a simple conversation with your project team. By your project team being in the same page in terms of communication, stakeholders of the project will feel they’re in the loop when it comes to budget- and there will be no surprises. 

These are just suggestions that some of our project managers have found to be helpful in terms of keeping a project on budget, feel free to tell us about your agile project management tips!

• Read more about Agile Project Management with Scrum

Agile, sprints, scrum - all these words are thrown around endlessly in software development. So, what are they and how do they work? Before embarking on a 10 hour passenger ride to Georgia, I picked up Microsoft’s Agile Project Management with Scrum from our Mobomo library to give a better perspective.

What is Agile and why should I use it?

No secrets here, agile is what it says - agile. Agile is a type of project management different from the traditional waterfall style in which company X is obligated to produce a product for customer Y by a set deadline. Unlike Agile, the waterfall method doesn’t allow much, if any, room for changes within the dedicated timeline. As a Project Manager, I know that customer and business needs change with no regard for your timeline. At Mobomo, we understand that change isn’t bad, it’s awesome so we should make room for it. Agile helps your development team balance changes with your customer and business needs.

Ok, cool - now I know that agile is flexible, but why is it good for business?

Agile saves you time and money. Software development is complex, but it’s predictable in itself. People, on the other hand, are not. Agile allows for this margin of unpredictability with a defined, empirical process called Scrum. Using Scrum, your product can be built with a focus on a minimum viable product. Creating a product with a minimum set of features provides value by testing your business’s concept before continuing development. This iterative approach builds on your highest priority features (i.e. sprints) and saves you time and money by building a product that people want to use and pay for over a product filled with excessive, unvalidated features.

I particularly enjoyed Schaber’s book because it describes real, lessons-learned use cases without having to experience failure first hand.

Tell me more about Scrum!

I love Scrum because it’s intuitive and fact-based. It’s foundation empowers the development team while also putting customers first. Managers love it because its style is rooted in helping others achieve their goals in a common-sense learning process.

Here at Mobomo, we’re always employing Scrum in our Agile Methodology to get our clients the best product possible with value in mind. I could go on and on about Scrum and Agile, but I hope this a valuable insight to our goals and processes at Mobomo!

• Read more about Successful Data Projects, Part III: Expect the Unexpected

As a project manager, you quickly learn no two projects are ever the same. Whether it’s the client, team, or content itself, there’s always some level of unpredictability.

Over the past year, many of Intridea’s projects have revolved around data visualization, with large data tables or many datasets. With their enormous levels of data and unknown variables, data projects can easily be intimidating.

Over the last few weeks though, I've been laying out the basics for data projects; enabling you with the tools and resources to make any project a success.

Last week was all about workin' that data. In the final week of Successful Data Projects, our theme is expecting the unexpected...

Build in a data flex requirement

During the course of development, changes to the data WILL happen. If a country changes their accepted name, accounting has revisions to last year's tax numbers, or the client decides to add data for whooping cranes, the course of development will be effected. Expect these kinds of speed bumps, and “find your zen” in the midst of ‘em.

Even when data changes cost you extra time, see them as opportunities. When speed bumps occur, you learn to anticipate future data-updates. Utilize this knowledge and be proactive. Take these “moments” to stage your site, predict updates, and outwit the changes.

Ultimately though, the key to unexpected data changes is building in a chunk of resources for "data flex". Not only does it give wiggle room for inevitable surprises, but more importantly, it forces transparency between you and the client. It's a great opportunity to discuss the client's plan for data change management, post-development, and sets the expectation that inevitable surprises may require more time and more money.

You’ll need help cleaning the data

Utilize data experts! Data cleaning will go much more smoothly if you enlist the client’s data experts to own it. Having large amounts of data and no real method for managing it can easily become a drowning point for project managers. Thus, utilizing a data expert, fluent in a language like Python or Ruby, is invaluable.

If however, you find yourself in a situation where you don’t have a knowledgable expert, a small amount of training on Google's http://openrefine.org/ to accompany the already helpful tutorial videos, should give even the most non-technical client a leg up on managing data.

In addition, as owner of the data, the client’s team is in the best position to help scrub it for inconsistencies and decide on final data formats. For example, a consistent format for country name, i.e. The United States of America, USA, U.S., United States, may seem tedious and unimportant, but if ignored can seriously mess with the functionality on your site. Large amounts of normalization can be required in this case and empowering your client or data experts with the tools to manage it will be a lifesaver!

Create a testing plan early and update often

Your site is only as strong as a single visualization or in laymen’s terms, first impressions are everything! Without a game plan for catching isolated issues, one bad chart (even if it’s out of 4800 possible charts) may spoil your entire user experience. Therefore, take care to estimate and plan for enough testing time to identify and fix these problems. And if you’ve got time to add buffers before deadlines, even better! As you’ve probably gathered---proactivity---is the underlining theme to thriving in these data projects.

Finally, while you may be an expert in the data, in most cases, the client is best suited for identifying these isolated issues. Thus, ask the client early on to commit to testing and identifying edge cases (you’ll thank me later). In my experience setting the client up with a fool-proof method for providing feedback, such as JIRA’s feedback widget, will save everyone time, confusion, and headaches during issue reporting.

Final Thoughts

With their enormous levels of data and unknown variables, data projects can easily feel intimidating and very overwhelming. Hopefully though, these tips will keep you one step ahead of the game. As long as you stay on top of the risks, strategize, and make honest communication a priority, success is inevitable.

Got any ideas, tips, or resources for managing big data projects? Let us know!

Want to learn more? Check out the entire Successful Data Project series below!

• Read more about Successful Data Projects, Part II: Work that Data

As a project manager, you quickly learn no two projects are ever the same. Whether it’s the client, team, or content itself, there’s always some level of unpredictability. Over the past year, many of Intridea’s projects have revolved around data visualization, with large data tables or many datasets.

With their enormous levels of data and unknown variables, data projects can easily be intimidating. They don't have to be though!

In the next few weeks, I'll be laying out the basics for data projects; enabling you with the tools and resources to make any project a success.

Last week was all about defining responsibilities and deadlines. This week, we learn how to "work that data"...

Work that Data: Participate in Discovery

Having an in-depth understanding of the data you’re working with is pivotal to grasping the quickest route to effective data visualizations. Clear requirements or not, you have to complete data discovery to ensure data points will support client requests. Completing data discovery before the design phase, allows your team to uncover patterns and reveals knowledge about the data. This discovery step is essential, and directly impacts how the end user will utilize the data.

Every set of data contains a plethora of answers; the art is in asking the right questions. Data doesn’t naturally highlight the pitfalls ahead or the series requiring extra effort. It doesn’t detail data points or leave a trail of hints about the stories it will illustrate. You have to manipulate the raw data in order to understand how your visualizations will represent it.

In my experience, there are three key routes to successful discovery. Follow these steps, and the answers you find are guaranteed to inspire and guide your team to the final design...

Explore data (column by column) to pinpoint outliers and inliers.

1. Where would this data be displayed? Is it metadata (chart titles, sources, notes) or core data (to be featured in the visualization)?
2. What is the largest character count entry in this column? Smallest? How could this impact design?
3. What is the outlier of data for the column? What kinds of gaps do you have separating those outliers from the majority of your data points?

Create a correlation quilt. It’s helpful to answer the following questions (especially when your site allows data comparison):

1. Are any groups of data overlapping data points (particular years, countries, or sources)?
2. Are any parts not overlapping or correlating? Note: edge cases will lie in these areas.
3. Are there repeat groupings that lend themselves to comparison?

Example of a correlation quilt:

Identify patterns of repeating variables to discover areas for normalization.

1. If you have a column of years, ensure no decades are listed, and all items are in identical four number year pattern (ex: 1990s).
2. Notice countries being listed in various ways (abbreviations, older names, olde english spellings, etc)? Make sure to normalize all references, example change “UK” to “United Kingdom”.
3. Depending on the data type you’re dealing with (number vs long-form-text vs abbreviation) eliminating superfluous punctuations and symbols like “&” can be helpful for future data cleaning and are often easiest in the early stages of programming.

While barely scraping the surface, these questions are a great place to start. Completing data discovery, before digging into design, will eliminate a lot of backtracking, misunderstanding, and (insert frustration here). It enables your team to find trends, as well as fully understand every aspect of the data. So what are you waiting for? Go work that data, and discover the stories it's waiting to tell!

Got any ideas, tips, or resources for managing big data projects? Let us know!

Want to learn more? Check out the entire Successful Data Project series below!

• Read more about Successful Data Projects, Part I: Setting Boundaries

As a project manager, you quickly learn no two projects are ever the same. Whether it’s the client, team, or content itself, there’s always some level of unpredictability. Over the past year, many of Intridea’s projects have revolved around data visualization, with large data tables or many datasets.

With their enormous levels of data and unknown variables, these projects can easily be intimidating and very overwhelming. However, don’t be discouraged.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be giving you a few tips and tricks on managing successful data projects. Tools to make you a success in any data project, and maybe even turn that intimidation factor into gasp excitement.
Define Data Update Responsibility Early On

Whenever possible, get data responsibility in writing! Depending on the project, data changes or unexpected additions to the data can (read: WILL) be time consuming! Having clearly defined responsibility in case of x, y, or z, from the start, can help eliminate costly delays and prevent confusion or unexpected costs for your client.

In addition, it's important to discuss and fully disclose the volatility of data and the nature of data visualization development. As data discovery happens, and you learn how the data relates to your front end code, you may have to reset expectations for a particular deliverable. Flexibility is key, and if your client’s expectations are already set to “expect the unexpected” you won’t lose any credibility in their eyes.

Keep in mind, you may need to define different roles for responsibility - ranging from table updates and query management, to data normalization. Every project is bound to have various tweaks, manipulations, or edits; having a plan laid out for these scenarios will counteract any potential scrambling or wheel spinning.
Establish Data Deadlines and Stick to Them

Working with a changing dataset is like hitting a hummingbird with a nail gun; when you pull it off, it's spectacular, but has less to do with nail gun prowess and much more with luck. Establishing data deadlines for both you and the client is one way to increase those chances.

In a perfect world, full data sets will be available at project kickoff, with no need for changes during development. In reality though, this is rarely the case. Thus, to keep your developers from chasing a moving target, establish early "stop dates" for data changes. Be clear with the client; specifying specific time frames for changes, and that any changes resulting from those updates will fall outside the original scope of work.

These guidelines make it much easier to box-in and track problems from changing the data, and introduce new edge cases during development. And most importantly, it enables you to track unexpected hours spent from said data changes.
Got any ideas, tips, or tricks for managing big data projects? Let us know!
Want to learn more? Check out the entire Successful Data Project series below!

• Successful Data Projects, Part II: Work that Data
• Successful Data Projects, Part III: Expect the Unexpected

• Read more about The PMP and Reality - Art, Science, and The Fuzz In Between

Recently I have been studying for the PMP, a certification exam for Project Management Professionals.

Like many people considering the exam, I was initially unsure about whether it would be a pointless cred, mind-blowing info that would turn me into a ninja PM, or something in between. The truth tends to lie in the gray area - the third option - and I’m happy to report it’s turning out be more useful than not.

The main benefit from studying project management as a discipline is that you discover many of the phenomenon you encounter day-to-day on the job is an actual thing.

Take communication for instance. For the 5 or so projects I’ve been working on of various sizes, it seems “duh” that some of these will require more, or more complex, communication. After all:

More client or internal team members = more stakeholders = more communication = more complexity = more risk.

I know this intuitively, but the PMP takes this concept and actually turns into an objective formula, given by:

# of Communication Paths = N * (N - 1) / 2  where, N = number of stakeholders for a project.

Simple, but comforting. Because now it means I can reasonably project the amount of communication a project will need, rather than wait for it to show up at my door.

This is not in some vague way like, “Oh yeah, we’re working with a large team/ a big enterprise client.” What does that even mean? How large is “large”? How big is “big”?

Now it means that you can look at team size - both yours and the clients - and mash that together to figure out how much complexity to expect, and how much extra time you’ll need, because you know the total number of communication paths for things like emails, IMs, meetings and followups.

Another example is performance. How do you know you’re doing a good job, making progress, and delivering value? For large projects especially, its easy to get stuck on the hamster wheel delivering incremental changes everyday (i.e. “doing some work”), without taking a step back to see whether the work translates into value as planned.

Here’s a neat PMP formula that helps with that too:

Cost Performance Index = Earned Value / Actual Cost   where, EV = Percent Complete * Budget At Completion and AC = sum of all the individual costs thus far

The Cost Performance Index thus gives you a number. If the value of the number is less than one means that money is being spent inefficiently on the project. So a CPI of 0.85 means that for every $1 spent on the project the client is getting $0.85 of value. A CPI of exactly one means that you’re perfectly on track.

It’s easy to see how calculating this index regularly would help a PM figure out whether they’re delivering just “some work” or real value.

To sum it up, studying for the PMP has been, surprisingly, a validating experience. While you can’t put projects in a box and account for all outcomes with formulas, you can certainly use a few quick tools to get a sharper sense of what your project looks like and plan accordingly.

And while being a PM isn’t sexy, it helps to know others have been down this path before and have been kind enough to assign names and processes that tie together all the balls in the air. This helps with pattern recognition across projects - being able to step back and say, “Okay, so this is what’s happening here”, and identify what you see as either a problem or just part of the process.

Finally, for all the formulas in the world, project management is a true blend of art and science, and I love that. It means that a robot can’t take my job, and that even though PMs increasingly use things like online software and messaging to get the work done, we still have to work outside the spreadsheets with people--complex, nuanced, frustrating, wonderful people-- every single day. At the risk of sounding simplistic, that makes me happy.

And, it keeps me human.