Project tips | Words to Work by

Project tips | Words to Work by

Project tips | Words to Work by

No weasels!

Here are some project best practices refined over years of technology consulting.

  • Don’t weasel into lateness.
  • Reduce risk by separating efforts.
  • Offer a proposal not uninformed speculation.

Don’t weasel into lateness.

Be realistic about your schedule. If you can see you are going to miss the date, move the target to a realistic new date.

It looks better to the project’s stakeholders to move a project’s completion date once and then meet that later date successfully, than to announce four times needing to move it in smaller increments.  Which project would you feel more confident in: a single announcement of perhaps 70% slippage and then deliver on time, or four incremental “need more time” admissions for a total of only 60% delay.

Reduce risk by separating efforts.

Plan the different streams of the project to run more independently rather than intertwining them. This allows better risk management.  For example, separate the metadata setup from a file import.

Offer a proposal not uninformed speculation.

When forming conclusions, or asking for a ruling on a potential requirement, always provide real examples from data, and totals of what you’re talking about. Don’t go flying off with an email shouting “I found this one strange folder full of DLLs, what should I do?” Do a windows search (or text-search your file dump) for .DLL files, and see what scale of issue you are dealing with.

Reading more

This article is part of a series discussing many aspects of content migration from an unstructured storage system to a document management system. The overview page is here: Content Migration to a DMS – Articles.

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