About a year ago, during a customer visit I noticed an interesting combination of hi-tech/low-tech project management and planning techniques which I later called the Project Management War Room and wrote about here. We implemented our own versions of this war room for our R&D and Professional Services (PS) teams. The results have been something to write more about!

After nine months of trying this out ourselves, I can report that both the R&D and PS war rooms have been highly effective. Both teams hold a 30 to 45 minute weekly project status meeting in the war room. I attend some of them just to keep in touch but read the minutes of their weekly meetings pretty regularly. Since the creation of the war rooms I have observed a noticeable improvement in project execution and a significant increase in our team performance consistency.  It seems that a wall full of visual information, key project dates/timelines on the wall, yellow or red flags if projects are late,  bug stats, weekly action items per project manager on flip charts … all in one room makes people more accountable and responsive for their projects and deliverables.

Here are a few best practices we have come up with so far:

• Keep the information on the walls to the absolute minimum to reduce overhead work and to make sure the wall gets updated regularly. We write project/feature name, the developer/consultant who owns it, the expected completion date, and the status (shown using a color and two to three other pieces of information such as delivery date, number of bugs open for that module). The key is to use colors, large normal and bold characters, and simple timelines to convey the bottom summary status. More detailed information is maintained in computer files/databases. We use a projector and drill into the detailed by looking at project and workforce reports when we need to. However, 99% of the time, the information on the walls is all we need to focus on and discuss during our war room meetings.




• A new item we have added of late is we write the original estimate for the project or feature and current spend level. This has also helped us quickly see which parts of a project are going off plan. I have included a sample of the project boxes we have on our R&D wall.

The service team was tracking a lot more detail on their wall. After attending the last meeting I could see how their version was not working as well as that of R&D. I could not tell, at a glance, where the issues are and what action is being taken. There was too much information to go over in 30 seconds which is my maximum attention span for such things. I asked the service team managers to take a good hard look at how R&D is doing it and to adopt more of their keep it simple approach.

This simple combination of good old fashioned paper printouts, sticky notes and timelines on the wall, flip charts to look at the big picture, and a computer/projector so we can drill into the project reports is working very well for us.  The visual impact of the war room, the intensity it has brought to our project teams and the performance improvements we have gained is incredible.