No industry likes having delays, but few need to be on time like the election industry does, where even minor delays negatively impact the stability of an entire nation.

No one knows this better than Yoslanie Benítez, Smartmatic’s Digital Transformation Product Manager. She tells us how working with short timelines is one of her biggest challenges and simultaneously the driver guiding her daily work at Smartmatic.

For Yoslanie, being able to work under pressure is a must, but this should not be confused for working under stress. “It’s more about keeping an optimal rhythm for efficiency, despite the time constraints or whatever incident might arise.”

Four fundamental keys

Yoslanie, who was part of the team that developed our biometric authentication and identification solutions, tells us that since Smartmatic works “on mission-critical projects, it’s essential to plan, prioritize, anticipate risks and stick to the plan.”

Planning. A detailed description of the project (i.e., services and products) is required to have a clear understanding of the associated scope, limitations and acceptance criteria.

“Once you have a precise description of the tasks and their complexity, the next step becomes that much easier.”

Prioritizing.  Prioritization serves as an indicator of the urgency for each step of the project. At Smartmatic, it’s fundamental to work with a task prioritization scale to meet our deliveries efficiently and effectively.

Anticipating risks. Her experience with complex deployments has given Yoslanie a better understanding of the potential risks and how to manage them. Smartmatic’s go-to method for analyzing and categorizing risks is to perform a qualitative analysis. This includes prioritizing the risk according to its possible impact on objectives, its likelihood of occurrence, and how much it can be tolerated in terms of the project’s restrictions on scope, cost, quality and schedule.

Sticking to a plan. To draw a roadmap and execute electoral projects, Yoslanie relies on the project management methodology developed by Smartmatic over more than 20 years working in the elections space. Smartmatic uses the framework defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI) as a reference for our own methodology.

Yoslanie’s experience, and that of the Smartmatic professionals in the electoral modernization industry, has allowed us to become the only provider that has successfully supported large-scale elections in over 35 countries, in complex environments and under tight deadlines. This was the case in Los Angeles County (United States), the Philippines and Honduras.