Richard Robinson

As unhelpful as it may seem, if your stress levels are skyrocketing due to your job then it's probably time to find another job. Of course that does depend on whether you are actually suffering from stress, and all the associated health implications, or if it's just an over exaggeration of the fact that you actually had to do some work today. Basically, we have to deal with factors that are out of our control and no degree of planning can anticipate what might happen with these. We introduce slack where possible and identify contingencies in the form of alternate resources, deliverables and dates. Ultimately though, we'll have to react to issues and if we can't do that without raising a heart beat then we may be in the wrong job!!

First of all you have to establish what constitutes a tight budget and why your project has one. If it's simply the case that the budget is fixed and can't be increased in any way then you need to determine what confidence you have in your estimates, how much contingency that leaves you and what's most likely to eat up that contingency. Establish at the outset what options there are for reining in total spend if needed. Is there flexibility on any of the deliverables or delivery dates and how can this be managed to stay within budget. The important thing is to call this out from the outset and avoid any surprises. Finally, structure your project so that you can monitor ongoing spend and prioritise key deliverables to report issues quickly

Whoever you deal with, try to engage on their terms. Understand the problems that they're facing and articulate what you're doing in a way that demonstrates this. Remember that different stakeholders will have different perspectives. Recognise that you're delivering business functionality, not just managing entries on a plan. Most importantly, put your hands up when something goes wrong and immediately look for a resolution.

Scope changes in themselves are not a bad thing, it just depends how they're managed. The important factor is to understand how any change of scope will impact costs and dates and what flexibility there is in either of those. If you identify opportunities to add additional data elements or relationships then it's a case of identifying the commercial benefits of the increased scope and the likely impact of embracing it. It's often the case that smaller pieces of work, which may be difficult to justify as stand-alone projects, can have marginal cost when incorporated into a larger piece of work. Rigidly locking requirements may mean that you fail to realise other opportunities that offer significant benefits.

Primary focus is expectation management. Ensuring that you clearly articulate what you're going to deliver and when is more import than the method and format of the message. Any changes to content or date need to be communicated at the earliest possible stage or the whole release process is called into question. In contrast though, quality should remain paramount and late exclusion of poor quality content is still better than a compromised release. There has to be an element of judgement to assess what issues should cause a deliverable to be excluded or a release delayed and which can be managed in a production environment. Ultimately this is at the heart of what a Release Manager has to do.

Cloud is simply off-premises data storage managed by a third party and you have to decide what services are worth paying for. Big advantage over on-premises storage is in the event of a site going down (site specific closure or regional disruption). Offerings such as AWS allow easy replication over physically separate locations, allowing speed and security of recovery. Latency can cause poor performance or increased expense for physically distributed data storage. Statutory requirements for jurisdictional location of data coupled with needs for advanced encryption increase cost and complexity. Long-term infrequent access storage can be expensive and distributed on-premises solutions (for audit rather than recovery) may complement Cloud.