Project Management/Facilitation Resources

[Aycrazy]

The below information is an older approach, please see the project facilitation document for a new process. The idea is that a manager/facilitator from the project facilitation committee helps to implement the checklist in a way that helps to move a project forward.

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Use these resources as you see fit for the current stage you are at. Please update your project tracker accordingly as you move along so the rest of the Code for Milwaukee community can contribute, give feedback, and support you.

Answer these questions:

• What is the problem?

  • What is the specific pain point?
  • Who are the users?
  • Have you captured key characteristics by identifying user personas?
  • What is their user journey?
    - What is your end goal for the user, and what may be intermediate steps?

• What are current proposed solutions?
  * How does a proposed solution motivate your user to take the desired actions?
  * How does your proposed solution align and lead to accomplishing the end goal?
  * Note: that the user may not be the key beneficiary of your solution. When this is the case, consider how your solution and user actions coincide with the impact you wish to make given your problem. If a solution does not do this well, is it a good solution?
  * Consider
  * Brainstorm, share out then narrow in on your choices

• What does success look like?
  - What are your specific key performance indicators (KPI)?
  - What is baseline for evaluating the magnitude and significance of the impact you are making or how effective your solution is towards motivating desired user actions?
  - How will indicators impact the changes you make to your solution?
  - What is the timeline for evaluating impact based on the KPIs you chose?

• Build a minimum viable product
  - What are the bare minimum features that would make this solution work?
  - What resources software, human, hardware, or other do you need to build it?

• Build these
  * What has to happen to get this built? When will this be built by? Who are the key people making this happen?
  * Get feedback
  * Strategies, rapid prototyping and evaluation
  * A/B Testing

• Get users and stakeholders for the various parties impacted by this solution involved, and understand how they interact with the solution?
  * Consider the current state of the conversation around the use of your solution, for this problem (proposed purpose)
  * Create an "ethical matrix" to capture indicators on how stakeholders might feel about different ways the solution can be evaluated as "successful"

• Did you succeed in solving the problem? (refer to your KPIs)

Next steps

• Post-mortem - take time to reflect on feedback to the product,how it will be improved, maintained, as well as the positive aspects of the process to this point
  What are opportunities for growth?
  * Are people who want to take more initiative in the project?
  * How can we best utilize everyone’s strengths?
  * Consider an approach and questions that build on success. A good framework for this is appreciative inquiry
  * Decide to expand or pivot (based on your feedback) → repeat cycle

Other useful frameworks (based on successful business practices such as lean six sigma):

• SIPOC
  • Thinks through a lifecycle of a product as a set of tasks and subtasks related to:
    - Supplier
    - Inputs
    - Process
    - Outputs
    - Customers