Tag: Project Management

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5 Business Process Challenges For Project Managers

Management and ownership are different. But are these truly incompatible? Successful business owners and entrepreneurs have simply struggled for a continuous period of time, juggling with anything and everything from legal and accounting through sales and marketing, IT, operations, recruitment, branding, management, negotiations, to name A FEW. This isn't necessarily a great thing if the vast majority of your time goes into dreadful stuff. I always cringe when I need to handle accounting or legal cases for over an hour! Experienced managers, however, are paramount to the future (and the growth cycles) of an organization. Yet, these are rare to… Continue Reading
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7 Reasons Why It is Difficult to Manage New Projects (Or Inherit an Old One)

What makes projects so difficult to manage? As a project manager, you need to assess the culture, your role, your team, how problems escalate, what your responsibilities are and how to tackle edge cases (delays, problematic team members, running out of budget, handling scope creep, disagreeing with a client, etc.) And within the right environment, everyone follows the company mission statement and the core principles of the organization. This will turn your decision-making process into a quantifiable, well-oiled machine, which should facilitate the team and get the work done. Project management is, in theory, the activity of ensuring a project’s… Continue Reading
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Strategies In Managing A Software Development Team

Prior to launching my own web development agencies over 10 years ago, I’ve jumped between the role of a senior developer and a manager multiple times – including leading and managing a software development team role. My first stunt in management was back in 2007. We were building a Java-based distributed software for a telecom group operating in multiple countries. I spent a year and a half with the company as a developer before joining the project along with our Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and a couple of other developers. The CTO and I spent several months working closely together… Continue Reading
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How to Manage Difficult People in Your Team

One of the biggest problems new managers face is juggling team management with other responsibilities. According to an analysis by the Center for Creative Leadership, about 68% of new managers struggle with this problem. In team management, managers mainly deal with difficult people and challenges involving underperformers, skills mismatch, slackers, and workplace conflicts. Although workplace conflicts resulting in confrontations are quite common in most companies, not all managers are adequately trained in handling such problems. This is particularly true for the 60% of new managers who have claimed that they never received any form of training in transitioning into their… Continue Reading
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What Does Technical Debt Mean?

What makes a $2,000 development project different from a $40K one? Code quality. The $2,000 project incurs the so-called "technical debt". A messy, spaghetti-like codebase is 5x, 10x, 20x more complicated to maintain, which skyrockets the maintenance costs over time. Technical debt is a well-known phenomenon in tech. But due to the price cuts, it happens all the time. The chart below shows the result of a survey conducted by CodeAhoy among software developers. Accordingly, the majority of the respondents are swamped with projects that have technical debt. [Tweet "There is a fine balance between providing a usable piece of… Continue Reading
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Fighting the Scope Creep

Scope creep is the process of adding more and more features to a fixed-cost project at the end of the development process or during delivery. Long story short, the client expects more features, better UI, or additional services within the agreed quote, which is not expected and hasn’t been planned by the web development agency. We have written a long Scope creep post for the DevriX tutorials section defining the problem, how to identify it, and the possible resolutions (at least for new projects). The CHAOS report identifies the majority of the projects as projects that failed or led to… Continue Reading
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Top Challenges When Using Slack For Managing Projects And Clients

How do you make the most out of using Slack? If you have to be available for emergencies but want to skip all the noise and offtopic going on, what would you do? The Downsides Of Using Slack In Practice Even with per-channel notification options and plenty of channels, it's easy to miss an important convo. Examples: 1) Are client/partner channels on or off? "On" means loads of noise. "Off" means you don't see emergencies if other folks aren't on duty. 2) How often do you look into "general help" channels helping out colleagues? It's a slippery slope. 3) What… Continue Reading
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Effective Hiring Tips (For Startups And Growing Teams)

There are fast-paced startups where execution is mission-critical. Then, there are the startups relying on an ongoing and regular business model - think of manufacturing or an ongoing type of activity that could easily take 60–80 hours a week. In other instances, freelancing may be a great model for a lean startup. The beginning phases of your startup have a lot to do with organizing and managing a team. Here are hiring tips you need to remember throughout the process. How Hiring Works Below is a video I created on the 4-step checklist for hiring freelancers especially for your startup. [embed]http://youtu.be/RLFTIHk9q_o[/embed]… Continue Reading
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How Remote Teams Work Together

Working remotely is about mutual trust. It’s the same as assessing the security of your home, the reliability of your office job, or the viability of your relationship. If you don’t care, you’ll lose. If you stress over it too much, something seems fishy and you may get burned again. I am a proponent of remote working in theory. And I’ve managed to build a team comprised of 70% remote employees. But I’ve also had to go over 5,500+ CVs and conduct over 1,000 interviews for the past 3 years. We’ve started 80 trials off those 1000 interviews and had to part ways with… Continue Reading
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Reply: Handling WordPress Project Management And Sales (Video)

One of the members in my Mentorship Group group has asked me a few strategic questions regarding the way we do business at DevriX. I'm trying to cover different areas related to running a business, handling marketing activities, becoming a better developer and solving business problems. This time I've decided to record a video since the questions would have taken a good chunk of time to write down and sum up as compared to a 13min video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5S_qlIssGo Here are the 5 questions I've covered in my video: How do you manage multiple client requests in a limited… Continue Reading