Office Depot – “A nice but also strange experience, where one learns a lot (not only technical)”

Pros

- Everybody gives 120% (at least)
- The business generating system (stores) is recognized as top priority
- International company and structures
- Nice colleagues, hands-on managers
- Good infrastructure for PM like conference rooms incl. automatic reservation system (at least at HQ)
- Very conscious about network security, a lot of activity to make the network save AND stable, while providing the proper tools (so that safety is not restricting functionality)

Cons

- Project documentation and quality assurance tasks (like reviews) are easily dropped, which contributes also to the emergencies that are then later again the cause for dropping the prevention measures, and so on.
- Therefore requirements are not always properly documented and communicated (leading to uncertainty among the different sub-teams and to the testers "re-inventing" what to test).
- Not always consequent follow-up on action items.
- Because everybody gives at least 120% to handle the assigned tasks and emergencies, there is not much time left for project coordination, discussion for technical and strategical clarifications and cross-team communication.

Advice to Senior Management

More effort and higher priority for error prevention activities. Define one part of the available resources to continue with regular project activities (especially QA measures) even during emergency situations. At least do not drop proper documentation, reviews and document updates to save the originally planned date at all costs.