The document discusses key aspects of delivering a project successfully. It emphasizes that the goal must be clearly defined with the customer, including why it is important, when it will be achieved, and how success will be measured. It also stresses the importance of identifying the customer representative, building the right team, maintaining ongoing communication, and managing resources and budget to ensure the project remains on track to deliver value to the customer.

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Delivering
The basic (and sometimes overlooked) things to know about delivering a project.
Ed 1Marc Celis

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CustomerTeam
Goal
The team delivers a goal to a customer.
A project is all about achieving a goal.
This is true for industrial or personal
projects.
When I say “By the end of the year, I want
to run a marathon”, that’s a personal
project.
In that particular example, I’m wearing
both the team and the customer hats.
But I may want to enlarge the team in
order to include a personal trainer, as I
think that it may help me to achieve my
goal.
Projects are important for individuals and
for companies.
Without projects, there is no change – or
no adaptation to external change. And
without change, there is no life.

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Goal
Define with the customer:
• Why?
• When?
• How do we verify that the goal is achieved?
The way to define a goal does a great
deal in the success of a project.
It is very important to understand the
higher aim behind the stated objective.
If I want to run a marathon, it is maybe
because I want to stay fit, or because I
was challenged by a friend, or because I
want to live an unusual experience, or to
raise money for a cause.
Knowing the ultimate goal helps to
identify what’s really important, and in
some cases allows to find alternatives.
“When” is important. “Someday I will
run a marathon” is more a dream than a
real goal. “I will run a marathon next
week” is not realistic if I’m not an
experienced runner.
The definition of success must be very
clearly specified with the customer. Am I
allowed to walk during the race? Should
I consider myself successful if my time is
5 hours?
Write the goal and definition of success
in a kind of “contract” document. Keep it
up-to-date and use it as reference during
the whole project life.
Contract
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Customer
Identify the person to whom the team is accountable for delivering the goal.
Identify and be in constant contact with
the “physical person” in the customer’s
organization who defines the goal and has
the power to accept the delivery.
There may be several stakeholders,
sometimes with different (conflicting)
needs. In that case, it is useful to have one
single “customer representative” who will
manage these aspects and be the SPOC for
the team.

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Team
Build a team with the right set of skills to deliver the goal.
Identify the ideal team that you need to
deliver a goal.
The maximum size of a team should be 12.
If that doesn’t look sufficient, consider
splitting the goal in intermediate steps, or
working with several teams.
List the skills that your team needs. Some
training or hiring may be required.
The longer people work together, the
more they develop a cohesive team
attitude, and the more effective the team
becomes.
In DEVOPS models, a part of the team
workload is dedicated to operational tasks.
This must be taken into account in
estimating the team’s capacity to deliver.

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CustomerTeam
Goal
Maintain this conversation.
Conversation
About
Unexpected things do happen.
The goal may evolve.
The timeline may change.
The team and the customer must maintain
the synchronization on the goal thanks to
a permanent conversation.
This is the most important success factor
in a project.

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Goal
Resource Team
Consume
Goal
Deliver
Customer
Cycle / step
If the final goal is too far away / complex / vague, split it in steps.
Operate
A team consumes resources to deliver a
goal to a customer.
Actually, the project methodology (Agile,
Waterfall) is not a very important success
factor.
Even with customers used to work in Agile,
it’s rare that an organization accepts to
deal without any commitment on a final
goal, time and budget.

8. Sensitivity: Unrestricted
Goal
Intermediate goals can also be delivered in parallel by several teams.
Large goals may be achieved faster by
having several teams working in parallel.
Intermediate goals must be defined for
each team.
Of course, the goals must be carefully
defined so that the different deliverables
are released in a synchronized manner,
and can be easily merged into the wider
goal.

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Build Verify Deliver
Team Customer
Whatever the used methodology, there
are always 3 high level activities:
Building a deliverable.
Verifying a deliverable: this is done both by
the team (to ensure that the job is done)
and by the customer (to accept the
delivery when the definition of success is
achieved).
The delivery usually happens first in a test
environment and then in a production
environment (once it is verified by the
customer).
The more steps there are until the final
goal, the more interesting it is to develop
automation of the verification.
Define (the goal), build, verify, release.

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Resource Person
Money
SkillInfrastructure
Supplier
WorkloadService
LearnTeam
Consuming resources means spending money.
Deliver Operate
Consume
Work (of the team), Infrastructure (e.g.
computing power), Services (work
delivered by an other team or an external
supplier) are different types of resources.
Somehow, skills can be considered as well
as a resource (acquiring a skill requires
work).
All the resources have a cost, and are
consuming budget.
A team must keep an exact track of the
budget spent and the remaining balance.
Shortage of resources (budget) must be
identified as early as possible and
mitigated (by reducing waste, increasing
skills, negotiating additional budget or
adapting the goal).

11. Sensitivity: Unrestricted
Money
Team
Consume
Goal
Customer Pay
Deliver
Generates
Money
€
€
€
Positive business case
In a sound project, the customer should
receive more value than what they spend,
and the team should consume less
resource than what they are paid.
Both the customer and the team must
build their business case, and ensure that
it is and remains positive.
To achieve this, the team must be
experienced, and have a good knowledge
of the delivery domain.