3 Lessons on Project Management (from Odoo's Methodology)
Tips on defining project success, phasing projects, and managing customer expectations
If you’re looking for a crash course on project management, I highly recommend reading through this book here. It was written by Odoo, an ERP system, on how to successfully implement their software.
Although it is primarily focused on helping partners in their ecosystem manage Odoo projects successfully, many of the principles they teach are broadly applicable to any large scale project.
I stumbled upon this during a pivot a few months ago when I was looking at Odoo as a potential partner. Although that pivot didn’t work out, I found the project management methodology I learned from them useful.
So today I wanted to share the most important takeaways from that book so you can lead projects successfully as well including:
What project success means
The different phases of a project
And how to manage customer expectations
Project Success is About Being On-Time and On-Budget
The first useful insight was that the decision makers for a project care primarily about two things: finishing the project on-time and on budget.
As a project manager, it’s easy to get this confused, as projects often involve many different stakeholders.
However if there is one person you want to please the most, it’s the decision maker who chartered the project, as they are the ones who will judge if the project was a success or not.
So given the choice between adding a new feature that a user wants but potentially risking the timeline or budget of this project, we have to ruthlessly prioritize finishing things on time and on budget first.
It’s so important that their methodology recommends splitting implementation delivery into TWO phases.
The first phase includes only the bare minimum needed to launch, and the second phase is for the nice-to-have features after.
They emphasized it’s better to not push back a Go-Live date for the first phase launch for the sake of completing a few extra features.
Even if the launch misses a few features, it’s better to launch and add things after than to delay the project.
Key Takeaway
When you’re managing client projects, always remember that the number one priority is to keep the project on time and on budget.
How to Phase Different Projects
The second insight I found useful was how they phased their projects. In their methodology, they gave this recommendation for how long to devote to each phase of a project:
There are a couple interesting points to this.
First is the relative amount of time you should spend planning vs implementing.
Given that the ROI analysis and the kick-off are part of planning, this indicates that Odoo believes that 15% of a project should be spent on Discovery, or roughly one week of planning for every 7 weeks of work.
What’s also interesting about this phasing is that they allocate 5% of the time for a “Go-Live” phase to turn on the system.
This is useful because training the team, turning the system on, and monitoring the launch for issues may take time, so it’s worth explicitly accounting for that.
And lastly, I like how they split their implementations into two: an initial one to get the basic requirements out, and a second one for nice to have and custom features.
This helps to keep the initial launch date the same and not let non-critical features delay a project launch.
Key Takeaway
Consider following a similar 15%-85% split ratio between planning and implementation, accounting for a Go-Live phase, and delaying non-critical features to a second phase after the Go-Live.
How to Manage Customer Expectations
Lastly, the Odoo methodology book spends an entire chapter discussing how to manage expectations, giving a variety of tips on this topic.
First, they mention avoiding giving customers different options. As the consultant, we should propose the solution and only show other options if the customer isn’t satisfied with your proposition. It advances the project timeline faster and avoids a decision by committee.
They also mention pushing back against data import requests. Often when migrating to a new solution, people want their past data imported into the new system.
But what they’ve found was that the ROI of this migration tends to not be worth it. People rarely check for the past data anyways, and it can be very error-prone and tedious process to import that data, thus adding more project risk.
They also suggested minimizing custom development, and going with configurations of out of the box solutions as much as possible.
I would agree, as I’ve found it’s generally better to spend time upfront looking for existing solutions than risking building something from scratch.
Building solutions from scratch takes more time and the final product likely won’t be as polished as a pre-built solution anyways.
Key Takeaway
Avoid giving options to customers, data imports, and custom development for smoother project delivery.
Final Thoughts
If you want a crash course in project management, I highly recommend looking through any methodology guides from ERP vendors. Their methodology is informed by thousands of implementations and is a useful crash course for folks interested in project management, regardless of the industry.
You can find the official methodology book for Odoo here.
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Thanks,
Michael
Nice, I wanna read this book. I like the pov to stick to time not feature scope. And rejecting data import.