Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Client Communication Guidelines

1. Verbal communication including how to greet, explain and react to clients on different phase like in analysis, deployment and UAT

2. written Communication, including emails and status reports

3. Identification and escalation of changes and change requests.

4. how to keep live and follow-ups a thread, notification and problem escalation

5. Management involvement or issue escalation techniques, i mean when to induct top layer in a mail loop. I mean no need to include senior management in every email until there is really a need, to provide them bandwidth for other horizons to work upon.

6. How to remain disciplined in front of client, I mean if there is a high priority issue or problem everybody is jumping in to resolve that. Rather let Client Liaison/Project manager to resolve it

7. Escalation of Project variance and deadline to all stakeholders

8. How to be proactive rather reactive in client communication.

9. How to keep your primary contact relax and happy even if project is in trouble.

10. Increase the project’s perceived importance in your and your Client’s field of vision.

11. Reduce the temptation to delay something on that project for the sake of another as you’ll have to report on progress in less than a week, e.g. schedule and budget updates.

12. Allow for a constant flow of review and decision making at regular intervals, hence making planning easier.

13. Rapidly encourage a good working rapport with a client making things easier for both sides.

14. Avoid dealing with ad hoc requests the minute they come in, often they’re not as urgent as they seem.

15. Have a consistent project folder structure and file naming convention.

16. Follow consistent processes, so you get better at estimating how long similar tasks in the future will take: e.g. creating a proposal or functional specifications which are dependent on size of the project.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

working on shop floor, Areas for workplace productivity improvement

1. plan your daily activities, Build a crude time schedule for what you are planning to today, document it somewhere where it remains in focus.

2. document your meetings and publish meeting notes and action items

3. Keep your surrounding quite so that you are not causing disturbance for others, conference room is best place for meeting do not start taking in dev. hall until mandatory. use outside corridor for gossips and chitchats.

4. document and implement your ideas, because innovation is an outcome of creative ideas

5. be consistent, achieve your timelines or share the change of action

6. better to arrive on time, delayed arrival should have reason.

7. distribute your workload when required so that everyone feels himself as part of team.

8. be motivated, share whatever you want with management for catharsis

9. document all non-billable activities to keep a complete picture of your utilization

10. Take responsibility for the direction of your career. Ultimately you are responsible for creating an environment in which you can learn and grow. The longer you stay on a “dead-end” career path, the harder it will be to stay positive. If you are not happy with the current directions of your career, communicate that to your manager if you wish to stay with the company; otherwise, look for another job that you feel is a better match.

11. avoid distractions, noisy and congested work environment make it impossible to communicate with clients and concentrate on work, if you feel your surrounding are not bearable kindly inform HR.

12. Block websites, If you find yourself to be one of those people who can easily get distracted and spend lots of time on the web looking at anything but your work, then you may need some restraint. Getting a child website blocker or even some post-it reminders might help you stay focused and save those sites for your coffee break. Look online for some good, free open-source website blockers if you think it’ll help you get stuff done.

13. draw a simple road map before doing a code or QA, including what is to be done and how, I still do that and it helps me remembering reusability.

14. do not dive in and lost in code, try to reach on surface often to have a holistic view of the problem space.

15. and at last but not least work smartly, remember what you have done previously and how it can be utilized again and again.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

CRM 2011 Email templates Flickering

Recently many of our users were reporting that when they modify or change any of CRM email template it start flickering or Internet explorer Crashes. upon investigation I observed that it is happening to only those templates where we have mentioned company’s phone number. upon further drilldown of problem  I concluded that it is happening due to Microsoft Lync Add-on of internet explorer, lynch add-on somehow injecting some HTML which is causing template to flicker horizontally and vertically. because when I disabled this Add-on everything started working as expected.