Hook 42 at the 2017 PMI Silicon Valley Symposium

team listening to presentation

Creating Business Value through Project Leadership is this year's PMI Silicon Valley Annual Symposium's focus.

For those of us in the software industry where Agile methodologies have been embraced for a decade, the blending of the Agile mindset with traditional project management has been a welcome change.

Idil Sabbagh, our Senior Technical Manager, is working towards her PMP certification while the PMI organization is changing their exams to include Agile principals. Idil looks forward to attending the symposium, networking with leaders in the industry and listening to their experiences in incorporating all project management principals. Bottomline, we all strive to deliver measurable results for our customers and a great way to do that is by taking the best from many styles of management.  

Our CEO, Aimee Degnan, will be presenting this year. She will share a real-world example of how Hook 42 healed a broken project, turning it into a thriving effort aligned to meet the customer’s website needs!

PMI Silicon Valley Annual Symposium takes place October 2-3 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

Session:

Healing a Broken Project

Aimee Degnan | Track 1, Ballroom J | Tuesday, October 3rd at 3:05 PM

What happens when you encounter a project that seems broken beyond repair, but for whatever reasons, a brand-new fresh start is not possible.

You may run into the following challenges with these "broken projects":

  • No clear scope
  • No requirements documentation
  • Far less remaining budget
  • Far less remaining time
  • "Project fatigue" from the client
  • Massive amounts of technical debt
  • And many, many more challenges...
  • How do you even start approaching such a broken project and bring chaos to order?

But what does order really mean? How does one measure success or completion in a fog of wrongness?!

Using project management and enterprise process management techniques, you can work through unclear and incomplete deliverables to help define what Done (success) means. This includes unraveling complex business logic, multiple business processes, and a slew of modules and configurations.

At the same time, we were proactively healing the client’s project pain by finally being able to articulate a clear list of what needs to be built versus what has been built.

We even got to answer the final burning questions:

When will it be done and how much is it going to cost?

Learning Outcomes

  • Starting assumptions may not completely prepare the team for the project.
  • Identify and proactively address stakeholder’s project fatigue and apprehension.
  • Explore practical techniques to unravel and define the half-built and the unknown.
  • Understand that tools and techniques are really applying the “best practice for the situation” and which tool you use will evolve through the project recovery process.
  • Understand how to prepare your project team for the road to recovery with the client.