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posted 03/30/07 by Lisa Crounse Meet the Project Manager - The Sequel

When we last left off, Amy was telling us about the trial and tribulations of creating the release scheule. Next she'll tell us about the gazillion hours she's spent in meetings...

Lisa:
How many meetings do you have a week?

Amy:
Actually, I just counted for this team, and not including preparing for the meetings (which includes setting an agenda, reviewing everything that happened in prior meetings and catching up on e-mail discussions for the week), it is at least 15 hours a week.

Lisa:
It seems to me that you are Rod, our development manager, are in many of the same meetings.

Amy:
Yes. That was especially important due the end game of our first release last month. We were really trying to spend a lot of time reviewing bugs and figuring out what absolutely needed to get fixed and what didn’t have a high use incidence by users.

Lisa:
Who prioritizes bugs?

Amy:
All of the functional leads including Product Management, Product Design, Product Development and Test Development. We also include Linda Saldana from our Tech Pubs team as sometimes its just something that needs to be documented in the product. Linda provides a unique perspective. She uses the application all the time – probably more like a real user would so she’s helpful in diagnosing the severity of an issue.

Lisa:
Hmm, sounds like I’ll have to interview her next…but lets get back to your copious meetings. What types of meetings do you have in a typical week?

Amy:
At the beginning of the week we have Core team which is attended by the functional leads for the most part. In that meeting we try to deal with questions that need immediate answers to keep things moving along. We also look ahead to see what milestones are coming up. Mostly, in this meeting we deal with issues that the majority of the team needs to be involved with.

Leadership meeting - This meeting is more about product strategy and larger issues. Decisions made in this meeting are for things that will impact future releases. While Core team is tactical, this meeting is more strategic. Its often helpful in this meeting to have some more senior managers who can help with their experience.

Lisa:
Seems like in both meetings (and I can speak to this since I attend both) we have a lot of new things that come up since this is the first product that Autodesk has introduced from scratch in awhile.

Amy:
Yup. Sometimes it seems like we are making it up as we go along (laughs). I mean, not really, but we have to address doing things differently than say a large team like the AutoCAD team.

This project is interesting because I can compare it to my experience on the AutoCAD team, which has been releasing product for so long. For them, it is sometime rote and very process heavy. The opportunity that excited me when I first joined this team is that we have the opportunity to act a bit like a start up, albeit a start up in a giant corporation!)

Having AutoCAD people on our team has been helpful as they have the experience from AutoCAD that they can share. We have a lot of flexibility so we can merge the two approaches.

Lisa:
Okay, back to your meetings! What other meetings do you have.

Amy:
Bug review – We have this every day when we are close to a release.

Executive Change Order, aka ECO – When we start the process of developing a feature, the design team creates a spec document which documents how a feature will work. At some point that document gets frozen. Then, we develop the feature and start doing testing on it, and well, then usually something needs to change. These changes can be just about anything. Sometimes the purpose is just to clarify some point that wasn’t documented in the spec. Other times, it is something new we want to add.

Lisa:
Are there any significantly memorable ECOs from this process?

Amy:
The one that is top of mind is “dock the dashboard on both sides.” As designed it was just supposed to be on the left, but users told us they wanted it on the right.

We also made a lot of changes to the area fill tool. During the initial technology preview we gathered a lot of useful feedback which helped guide our decision making. Area fill is a pretty computationally intensive tool so we had to make a hard call about how we were going to relate the message to the user that the application is computing. We decided to spend a day of a senior engineer’s time to figure out how to alert the user that something was happening in the background. Otherwise, the user would sit there wondering what was happening.

Lisa:
Area fill seems to have a life of its own. It always comes up in our conversations.

Amy:
It is funny because we finished that feature really early. It had to evolve a bit as we got more usability testing under our belts.

Lisa:
So, to wrap things up, what has been the most interesting part of this project for you?

Amy:
The most interesting part? Don’t get me started (more laughter). I can say that the silliest part was posing for the picture to have myself made into a block.

And thus, we have Cecily.

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