Meet our new Persona!
Mary Beth Raven October 29 2008 10:51:25 AM
Customers,I am pleased to introduce"Philippe" to you. He is our new end-user persona, and we are going to use him to help us design all the Lotus end-user facing products (Notes, iNotes, Sametime, Symphony, Connections, Quickr).
To create him, we interviewed real project managers (some of whom use Notes and some who did not), We refined him by getting feedback from you during the Lotus Leadership Alliance conference in September. We chose a project manager at the request of the GCPC (Global Partnership Customer Council), who thought that this would be a valuable additional persona. We also made sure we interviewed non-Americans, and made this persona a "non-American." (Daisuke is our other non-American end user; our app devs and admins are German, Canadian, Indian, American.)
Many thanks to Michelle Cooper in our user studies group for conducting the interviews and writing up the persona!
The other personas will continue to be used when we have very specific purposes for doing so, For example, if we have specific cases where we need to consider "Ted the VP" who delegated his Calendar to Betty.
So, without further ado, I give you Philippe.
| | Philippe Babineaux · Project Manager “The best way to fail is to not communicate adequately.” Philippe's main responsibility Create the schedule and identify resources to guide the project while managing issues and risks throughout the project's completion. Project Manager's main responsibility Understand client needs and set up the project plan to successfully fulfill those needs within the budget and given timeline. Renovations :: 3, Avenue Europe, 78140 Vélizy Villacoublay, France :: Tél. : +33 (0)1 58 03 26 26 |
Persona summary
Philippe is a 43 year old Project Manager for Renovations in France. He considers himself as an easy going person who is very efficient at his job. Philippe is highly organized and detail-oriented.
As a project manager, Philippe's main responsibility is to manage and track issues and risks through a project's completion. This includes facilitating communication, managing cost, and scheduling resources and deliverables. He is currently managing 4 projects simultaneously, one is a new sales floor inventory device, one involves an internal initiative for streamlining request processes, and the other two are internal software initiatives for vendor tracking. Philippe's days are spent acquiring or collecting status information from various team members in back-to-back status report meetings, turning that information into reports for management and stakeholders, and working to resolve any issues or risks that come out of those meetings. He has the ability to make timely decisions and does well at managing the project's resources.
Philippe knows that communication and collaboration are the most important factors in getting his job done and are tied into all activities of a project.
Philippe is dedicated to his work and to the people on his projects, so he is willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done and make the projects run as smoothly as possible. He takes responsibility and accountability in order to deliver on all his project commitments.
Philippe's biggest challenge is working with all the different tools in order to stay organized, be effective in managing the projects and getting his deliverables out to the various stakeholders.
Day-in-the-life Scenario
| Philippe starts his day around 6:00am. After getting himself ready for work, he wakes up the kids, eats breakfast and may do a quick check of email using a VPN connection before leaving for the office. He lives about 30 minutes from his office in Velizy, Yvelines (a small suburb outside of Paris) and is usually at work by 7:30am. He enjoys driving to work and uses the time alone to organize his thoughts. After grabbing a Café noir and booting up his computer, Philippe reads and responds to email and gets in any quick blog reads from his RSS feeder before other people start filtering in at 8:30am. |
Philippe typically has one to five meetings in a day which are usually followed up with action items. He has two this morning which are both project team meetings that cover status reports for tasks, project schedules, and any other updates (for two different projects). After each meeting, Philippe writes the meeting minutes, sends them out, and updates the project plan. These reports help him create a more formal status report for the client and upper management that's due on Friday which also includes budget and time perspectives.
Philippe accesses Renovations' intranet site daily. In the morning he uses it to gain access to his project planning tools which he uses throughout the day. He also uses it to get to other internal sites and to check on corporate communications that are posted there.
Occasionally Philippe will meet a client or co-worker for lunch, but usually he just has a quick half hour lunch in the canteen at noon. He'll also try catching up on email or getting in some RSS reads before the rest of his afternoon starts.
After lunch he focuses on any outstanding to-do's from action items assigned in the status meetings. He also does his planning and writing documentation for the projects. From two o'clock on, Philippe is in more meetings. Today he has another status meeting and then a funding approval meeting to review the projects that are going into the initiate and solution scoping phases. These two meetings will be held in a conference room to accommodate the team members who are co-located as well as those who are remote workers and dial into the conference call.
Before leaving the office for the day at five o'clock, Philippe will spend the last hour of his day checking and responding to email and dealing with any other business issues that have come up.
At home, Philippe spends time with his family before eating dinner. After watching TV for a bit, Philippe will check his email one more time before going to bed by eleven o'clock. Normally, Philippe doesn't work at night, but there are cases where there might be a problem that he has to attend to at a client site in a different time zone or if a special project is going on that he needs to manage.
Detailed information
Demographics
- Philippe is 43 years old.
- His native language is French, but he speaks English, German, and some Italian.
Certifications
- Philippe does not have his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and doesn't see a strong need for it at this time; however; he does occasionally check in with the PMI website for any relevant or interesting articles and has taken classes from them in the past.
Previous positions
- Philippe's past positions have included other project management roles and analyst roles as well as consultant.
Time in current position
- Philippe has been in his current role at Renovations for six years.
Time doing project management
- He's been doing project management for 11 years.
Interests
- Philippe enjoys reading but has a hard time fitting in recreational reads these days. Almost all of his reading is done on-line either though specific websites or RSS feeds he's subscribed to, but he will occasionally get in a book or even an audio book.
- Philippe likes to stay active. He tries to stick with a regular exercise routine and often is part of sports league. A lot of his activity is done outside. Some of these activities include: biking, running, swimming, taking walks, playing soccer, and the occasional round of golf.
- Philippe's most important interest is his children. He loves spending time with them and participating in any activity they are a part of.
Work Characteristics
Works with
- Internal clients
- External clients
- Stakeholders
- Human Resources
- Information Technology
- Application development
- Architecture
- Support
- Corporate Systems
Work environment
- He is part of large multi-person project teams who often contain remote members.
- His clients and team members are located in France, Germany, Italy, and the United States.
- Reserves conference rooms, uses his office, and occasionally works from home.
- Uses his laptop to be able to communicate with team members, keep up with email, assist with meetings, and travel to client sites.
- His greatest pressure is making sure things stay on track and when they don't he is required to make sure they get back on track.
- Philippe has managed as many as 15 projects at one time.
Preferred communication methods
Philippe knows that communication is the most important factor for success and he understands that everyone communicates differently and has different preferences. By understanding this, Philippe makes every effort to communicate in the way that works best for the person. It also depends on the situation since he works with many remote people.
Philippe feels that face-to-face meetings are best and prefers them whenever possible. His experience has proven that in-person meetings and even less formal chats help build relationships. Whenever possible, Philippe will make the effort to go to a team member's cube to chat even if it means he has to walk to another building.
He also uses email, chat, web conferences, video conferences, and the telephone to communicate with his teams. In addition to personal preferences, time and money constraints play a factor in his communication choice. For example Philippe has weekly meetings with a team in another region, so he opts for a video conference instead of traveling there. He also often switches to using the phone if an instant messaging session becomes to detailed and decides it would be better to talk on the phone.
Technical environment
Philippe needs to stay connected and he mainly uses his laptop to accomplish this. For status meetings, he uses his laptop to take notes and/or present the meeting agenda and topic along with Sametime Meetings in addition to a conference call number to connect to remote team members.
Lotus Notes is the software that's most important for him in getting his job done. Philippe doesn't have one program that allows him to accomplish all that he needs as a Project Manager, so he feels that he would choose one that best accommodates his need for communication. Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project would be second since he needs something to help him manage his work. From either of these programs he is able to build the project schedules and use that to work from and guide meetings and manipulate the dates if necessary.
The program he spends the most time using is Lotus Notes for email. Microsoft Excel would be next followed by Word and Powerpoint. His web browser and Microsoft Project are also at the top of his list.
Philippe stores all of his documentation for his projects in document repositories on servers. These servers are backed up and also allow the client access to the documents pertaining to them. He accesses these repositories as well as other tools he uses daily from the Renovations intranet site. (The intranet site is built with WebSphere portal,but he's completely unaware of what technology is being used.)
Tools
Software
| Hardware
|
Responsibilities
Main responsibility
- Create the schedule and identify resources to guide the project while managing issues and risks through the project's completion.
Responsibilities
Initialization of Projects: The planning stage
- Set up the kick-off meeting
- Identify and document requirements, goals and objectives
- Allocate resources and put together the teams
- Schedule meetings
- Start brainstorming
- Plan assumptions, constraints, what things to be aware of, conflicts
- Define deadlines and milestone dates and set project schedule
- Know the clients and their restrictions and environment.
- Provide cost estimates and develop budget
- Cost benefit analysis
- Complete risk assessment
Managing the Project: Being on top of everything on the project
- Track and hold weekly meetings to collect status information from various team members assigned for the tasks in the project plan
- Write and publish progress reports every week for upper management and/or client management.
- Reports include objective status information
- Client and internal management reports are separate
- Update the project plan on a weekly basis to drive metrics
- Create purchase orders
- Work around schedules and vacations/holidays
- Work though time zone issues
- Manage budget
- Manage the tasks between teams and clients
- Track the project to the schedule, to the plan, and to the spec
Managing Issues and Risks
- Being aware of and identify delays, obstacles, scope changes, client changing their minds, team issues and challenges, dependencies other higher level things like availability of systems, third party, etc.
- Deal with escalated issues
- Determine how to fix problems/issues and reschedule the work if necessary
- Work with subject matter experts for solutions
- Present issues and risks to client
- Make the owner aware of cost related to a decision
Completing a Project
- Getting formal approvals from client
Goals
End goals
- To minimize risks to my go live/end date
- Be on time
- Stay within budget
Experience goals
- Be successful
Pain points
- Being able to find stuff when you need it is my biggest challenge
- Not one program to accommodate all his needs
- Working across cross-cultural teams and time zones
Skills
- Highly organized
- Detail-oriented
- Communicates well within the many mediums used
- Accountable and responsible
- Comments [4]