Project Management And Feedback

As a kid I played this little game at school we called ‘telephone line’. Twenty kids were hurdled up into a circle. One started by whispering a sentence in the ear of his neighbour, so the other kids couldn’t hear what was said. The neighbour would say the same sentence to his neighbour, and so on, until the sentence was ’round circle’. The fun of the game was comparing what the last one had heard with what was originally said. Mostly, they didn’t even come close.

Photography by ItzaFineDay.

In project communication, feedback is the most effective tool a manager has.

There are three main reasons why feedback should be incorporated in the project:

1. To resolve an uncertainty (iterate to get the desired information)
2. To reassure stakeholders that their interests are met
3. To increase quality, needed when a possible failure creates damage (using feedback to get more validation steps for a certain software component to increase its reliability and quality).

There are a lot of project management techniques and artifacts available just for the purpose of feedback. Not every time it is clear in these methods that it actually is a feedback mechanism handed to you.

In the list below some samples are mentioned of artifacts that you can almost find in every method, and the kind of feedback it provides.

• Requirements definition: Feedback to the users how their requirements are noted after talking, analyzing and negotiation
• Functional design: Feedback to the user how their requirements are translated to a new system
• Prototype: Feedback to the user how their requirements are translated to a new system
• Schedule: Feedback on constraint “time”
• Budget: Feedback on constraint “cost”

But how do you provide feedback?

There are three types of medium that can be used to provide information for feedback:

• Verbal: nice expensive word for talking about the subject.
• Written: paper is patient they say, but also Word documents that never are printed can be considered within this category.
• Mock up: I am struggling for a nice word for this type, but prototypes, screen prints in Powerpoint and other means to visualize a future system can be considered as a mock up.

Every type has its own advantages and drawbacks. Verbal is fast and easy to do. However, if you need to fall back on an issue a couple of weeks later, you can only hope that everybody remembers it correctly. Writing will overcome this last problem, however, write one large document with no images and not every user will be able to plow through the document. Here some visual representation might help out like a small prototype that shows users what the general idea is of the new system. But, creating a mock up cost time, and after you have used it, you will throw it away; you must consider if it is worth the cost.

In the previous paragraph I already outlined the aspects that you should consider in choosing the right medium for feedback on the product:

• Audience: which medium is most likely to have the best reception;
• Time it is needed: the time frame in which the information in the feedback is needed. If you need a decision if a green button is better than a blue one, after you have shown it, you probably won’t need it again; if the information serves a formal (contractual) purpose, you need it available for future reference; if you have an outcome of a specification of an interface, you need the field definitions available for future use.
• Cost of feedback: every medium has its own cost. Consider if the use of the medium is worth the cost.