Tag Archive for: #bonniebiafore

Balancing technical and business priorities in an agile backlog is a constant negotiation between delivering immediate value and maintaining long-term application stability. The goal is to help stakeholders see and understand the trade-offs that must be made between the outcomes that they want and the work to maintain technical integrity. Here are approaches to consider:

• Tie every backlog feature to measurable outcomes. Make sure that all feature descriptions include business value, technical enablers, and/or risk reduction so every stakeholder understands why a feature matters. It’s a good idea to specify when a feature is a prerequisite to other features that create technical stability or drive business outcomes (so a prerequisite feature isn’t altered because its importance wasn’t clear).
• Use a scoring model for prioritization. Models that assess the value of each backlog item help achieve the right balance between business and technical needs. Using time and cost data regarding the production of every backlog feature, include an estimate for each backlog item of the value it will deliver to the business or the value for the technical team that maintains the agile project’s deliverables. Data on delivery timeframes can help prioritize features so the ones with the most value and shortest delivery timeframe get the highest priority. also be used to identify features with the greatest value, and the shortest delivery timeframes are at the top of the prioritized backlog. 
• Plan capacity for technical rework. Even a perfectly balanced mix of business and technical backlog items can result in incomplete or technically flawed features. Set aside a consistent sprint percentage—often 15–20%—for rework, implementing additional automation, or infrastructure work to prevent technical issues downstream.
• Facilitate transparent trade-off discussions. Stakeholders’ impatience for business-related features often chafes at the time it takes for the IT team to make technical features work properly. Prioritization discussions can get contentious and messy. So, to reduce this contention, the business folks need to understand the technical necessity of IT required features. Bring product owners, engineers, and business leads together regularly to reassess the backlog so everyone contributes to prioritization decisions. Note: Many agile projects stumble because the full complement of business and technical stakeholders who attend early prioritization meetings dwindle as the project progresses. Make sure that everyone needed attends!
• Assess priorities in the bigger picture. Markets shift, systems evolve, and dependencies change. Look outside the organization and review your backlog from that perspective to ensure alignment with strategy and business objectives in a rapidly changing world.

For more about project requirements, check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Requirements course.

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 103,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________

A new role is much like a project, whether it is a job, a consulting gig, or a volunteer position. When it starts, you digest the avalanche of info you receive to get up to speed quickly. Initial planning helps you do your job well. And when your “role playing” ends, a smooth handoff to the next person makes everyone’s day just a little brighter. Here’s how managing a role delivers success and gains admirers at the same time. 

• Plan for success. This is more than dressing for success. What are your goals? Doing good work, sure. Contributing to the organization’s success, of course. Perhaps climbing the corporate ladder or building your own business. Whatever you want to achieve, document your goals in your career/job/gig plan. This will help you keep your personal goals in mind. (If this is your career, you’ll be updating your plan as your goals and role change.)
• What’s important about this role? For projects, we think about desired outcomes, objectives, requirements, etc. To succeed in a role, the organization’s goals and objectives tie directly into yours. You support the success of the organization success, whether that’s your employer, client, or the non-profit you support. Have a chat with your manager, your manager’s manager, the client contact who hired you, or the non-profit’s executive director. Add these goals, outcomes, and specific expectations for your role to your plan.
• Identify what the role represents. Job descriptions might be well-defined, but they’re often so generic that you can’t tell what the work is. As a consultant, you usually prepare a statement of work, so part of the gig is coming to an agreement with the client on what you will do. Regardless, talk to the person who best understands the role and ask questions to collect as many details as possible. This could be your manager, someone with the same role, the person you’re replacing. Note: you will always (always!) learn more about it as you go.
• Document your role. Add the specifics of the role to the plan whether you get the details from someone else or learn from experience. Maybe it’s paying invoices when they come in, submitting tax forms every quarter, prepping a presentation for board meetings, ordering supplies when inventory runs low, designing a new social media campaign. Document the tasks you perform and the schedule for each. Don’t forget all the user accounts you might set up, like software subscriptions, regulatory websites, and so on. If you use processes, create a section for all those how-tos. Also, keep track of your achievements large and small. These can help you snag your next role or the promotion you’re seeking.
• Hand off the role to the next person (if applicable). The plan that you’ve built and maintained is a great start for a user manual for the next person, whether it’s your replacement, someone from an operations team, or a client employee. Remove your personal goals and you have a document that tells what has to be done and how, what accounts need to be reassigned, who needs to be informed, and so on.

What do you think? Do you see the value in this approach? If so, try it on something small, I’d love to hear your questions or results in the comments section.

For more about small projects, check out my Project Management Foundations: Small Projects course.

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 102,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________

Part of a project manager’s job is to manage risk on behalf of the sponsor. It is NOT to stop the sponsor from taking risks, because risk is often necessary to move a business forward. Here are ways to support a sponsor when they decide to take risks.

• Understand how taking the risk can advance the business. What are the desired outcomes that require taking this risk? If appropriate, take time to explore less risky ways to achieve those outcomes. Also, identify early success indicators that would show that the risk-taking will deliver the desired results. 
• Make sure that project risks are fully understood. The project sponsor needs to know about all the risks the project presents. Share the risks, indicators of when risks might come to fruition, and any planned response actions. Also, communicate the costs and schedule impacts of those response actions.
• Know when the risk becomes unsustainable. A risk that turns into an issue can significantly affect the project and even the business. Early in the project lifecycle, determine the limits or thresholds of cost and schedule impacts that the sponsor is willing to accept to achieve their goals.
• Determine how to manage skeptical stakeholders. Pressure from key stakeholders about risks can be overwhelming. Work with your sponsor to understand what’s been communicated about the risks being taken, and how to communicate going forward to manage key stakeholders’ concerns. The key is to communicate consistently among all parties, especially the sponsor and project manager.
• If you fail, fail early. Typically, project risks relate to a few key processes or assumptions about deliverables. Work on those as a proof of concept, as early as possible. That way, the project premise is tested early. If you find that the project’s fundamental concepts aren’t feasible, the business will save precious time and money.

For more about sponsors, check out Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez’ course How to Be an Effective Project Sponsor.

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 102,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________

Rarely do all members of a project team participate from start to finish of a project. As a result, it’s important to have a procedure ready to handle the departure of a critical team member. Here’s a template for the steps to take.

1. Take a deep breath. Get those endorphins flowing to enhance your creativity and problem-solving skills.
2. Mentally commit to moving forward. This is a common occurrence that project managers handle all the time. It’s not the end of the project.
3. Consider the extent of the loss. Think about the level of experience and knowledge you’re losing. Don’t exaggerate its impact. Identify exactly what this team member brought to the table. Capture their specific contributions, decisions they made, and commitments they made to stakeholders. Pinpoint the gaps you need to fill and when. On the bright side, losing a valuable team member often prompts another person to step up.
4. Develop the questions you need to answer and schedule a handoff session. Use the session to address pending decisions, undocumented agreements, and potential political landmines arising from their departure. Get introductions to their key contacts while they still have influence. The key here is to recognize that there might be gaps in documentation of what they know and also that their replacement doesn’t know it all.
5. Press management for a replacement. Investigate options both internally and via contract. Prepare impact statements regarding how delaying their replacement affects the project schedule. Then, when the new team member is on board, prepare a short project brief for them that highlights wins, the current status, critical milestones, and insights from the handoff session.
6. Pay extra attention to stakeholder management. Losing a critical staff member can rattle stakeholders. It might create political issues, as others might try to take over the influence the departing person had. Connect with key stakeholders and reaffirm their and the project team’s commitments.
7. Adjust expectations. The departure WILL have an impact, like delays or production errors. Evaluate and share any setbacks without making them sound like a catastrophe. Develop and discuss plans to help the replacement to reduce negative impacts. If the project schedule is affected, be specific about the support you’ll need to get back on track.
8. Diligently maintain project control documents. A team member change can require changes to control documents to make sure the team and stakeholders remain in synch. Schedules might change; new risks might result; cost might change to cover the replacement person. These changes need to be identified, monitored, and communicated to make sure perceptions of project outcomes match the new reality.
9. Be prepared to manage emotions. Change of any type can produce emotional responses from stakeholders and team members, whether they are reactions to reduced project outcomes or disruption of a high-performing team. Start by acknowledging and validating people’s emotions and concerns. Give them the opportunity to talk about them. Help people maintain a positive outlook by focusing on the benefits of the project. Ask team members questions like “how can we address this?” or “what’s the takeaway?” to help them identify solutions.

Write up your procedure, so it’s easy to find when this challenge arises.

For more about resource management, check out Chris Croft’s Managing Resources Across Project Teams course.

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 102,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________

Organizations often treat internal staffing as “free,” thinking that existing salaries don’t affect the project’s bottom line. Not so! That approach distorts the view of project viability and staff capacity and undermines the accuracy of long-term planning. Here are several ways that tracking internal staff costs is beneficial.

• Tracking internal staff costs recognizes that time is money. A lot of money. Whether a team member is on the payroll or a contract, time is money. If an engineer spends fifty hours on a project, that’s fifty hours they aren’t working on something else. That’s often referred to as opportunity cost. An accurate picture of these time/money trade-offs is the foundation for strategic decisions about workload priority and overall spending. Tracking in-house team members’ time isn’t micromanaging; it’s understanding where your organization’s most limited resource is really going.
• It shows the true cost of a project. Projects appear less expensive on paper when internal time isn’t counted. But considering the meetings, troubleshooting, and coordination that salaried staff handle, the “free” project resource becomes very costly. Capturing that time and effort keeps cost estimates honest and makes your reporting more credible when you must justify spending.
• It enhances resource planning and forecasting. Tracking time spent by internal team members helps management identify who is overloaded, under-allocated, and which functions require the most effort. That data reduces guesswork and increases insight of performance. Future planning becomes sharper, and the team avoids burnout because hidden workload becomes visible.
• It strengthens project accountability. When all project work hours are tracked, people become more aware of task switching and time spent on non-critical work. It amplifies the need for shared accountability. Time tracking helps everyone see the financial impact of their work on the bottom line, encouraging collaboration across teams.
• It reveals the true return on investment (ROI) of a project. Without staffing costs, you can’t measure a project’s return on investment. People might think that a project was delivered under budget, but factoring in internal time can tell a different story. Tracking staffing costs supports legitimate comparisons of projects, and better decisions about where to invest the next dollar or person-hour.

For more about project finances, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Budgets course.

Coming Up

Starting a new Project Manager role comes with a lot to navigate, new teams, new expectations, and the pressure to lead early. Join Anna Anderson and I for Office Hours on Friday, January 16, 2026 @ 12pm MT/1PM CT for a live conversation on what really helps new PMs settle into their role with confidence. This session is ideal for first-time PMs, career transitioners, and recently promoted project managers. Click here to join!

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 101,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________