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The goal is to change the rules that are affecting your ability to make MORE.  In my last post, I wrote about challenging the assumptions.  The supply chain or supplier strategy is a great place to start.

What about the material specification itself?  Most material specifications are established by a default rule of thumb established to minimize risk of failure.  The result is a conservative specification that will cover a wide swath of situations.  I seldom see material specifications done to maximize throughput.

What’s available to challenge?  Everything.  Dimensions, tolerances, material specifications, storage requirements, quality checks, etc.  Another place to look is deeper into the supply chain.  What about your suppliers’ suppliers?  What you challenge will be determined by what gives you the most productivity.

When we worked with a boom manufacturer, we found that the output of a particular type of boom was constrained (at all suppliers) by a worldwide scarcity of a key component.  This scarcity was about three links earlier in the supply chain.  We looked for a substitution.  Working with the engineering and supply chain teams at the supplier and the customer, we found another material, which was significantly cheaper, allowing them to purchase three times the amount of the new material for the same price as the old material.  With all the materials in full supply, the boom manufacturer was able to boost output tenfold!

Not only are the technical specifications open to challenge.  Your supplier management rules are open to question, too. Just like the engineers create conservative rules to minimize technical risk, it is common practice to make policies to minimize commercial risk.

Some common things we look at are: batching policies, supplier qualification, supplier selection (sole source is my favorite), price breaks on quantities, delivery frequencies, and more.  Often supplier selection is based on mostly on price, without consideration to supply risk.

When we worked with one supplier, we questioned a long established rule of restricting their purchases from any one supplier to no more than half the supplier’s total output.  This limitation was restricting their output as they were lacking the supplies to produce more.  This easy fix untapped the potential to quickly and dramatically increase supplies, and in turn the factory’s output.

Finding extra capacity is not rocket science, but it does require an eye on the process and a willingness to challenge what you’ve done in the past – sometimes an uncomfortable activity.  I enjoy it, though.  Eli Goldratt, my friend and mentor, said famously, “Sacred cows make excellent steaks”.  I agree.

Read how we sacrificed those sacred cows in the materials and supply chain and in turn, achieved great results in lesson 5 in our eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7 Lessons Learned from a Disaster. 

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When our consultants find something blocking the process, we use a simple technique to find the hidden assumption(s).  We’re not challenging every assumption, just the ones that create situations that block us from where we’re going.  It does involve asking the question, “Why?”.  Sometimes we ask it 5 times.  But asking “why?” just tells us the “reasons”, not always the assumptions.

A couple of words about assumptions – we’re all familiar with the word game played when someone says “assume” (for those that aren’t aware of that, when you make an assumption, it makes an ass|u|me), but that’s not what I’m talking about here (although I do agree with that statement).  I think of assumptions as a person’s basic understandings of how things work.  This is useful for thinking in terms of cause and effect.  For example, the cause, “I kick you in the shins” will likely result in an effect like, “you will be angry”.  Not very hard, but the assumptions I make in this situation could be, “you don’t like being kicked in the shins” or “your feelings will be hurt by an attack on your person” (actually, this latter statement has another assumption, “when people’s feelings are hurt, they react with anger”.  Each of our processes has causes to create effects.  Sometimes, we don’t like the effects, so, if we want to change them, we should dig into the assumptions around these cause and effect relationships.

In a process, assumptions take the form of management rules (Why are we doing that?  We’ve always done it that way!), understanding of technical process (we have to put a 15 degree radius to allow for a subsequent step), quality requirements (inspection steps), or product specification requirements (dimensions or features).  These are baseline parameters of how the process functions and its boundary conditions.  Most of these are important and needed.  However, over time, these rules and requirements can become like barnacles on our process, no longer needed and slowing down the process.

Our goal is to find the assumptions that are erroneous.  An erroneous assumption is the rule, requirement, or boundary condition that is no longer required. (Why are we doing that?  I don’t know! We’ve always done it that way!).  The only way to find those assumptions is to zero in on the blockages and ask why certain requirements (the ones that are slowing you down) are necessary.

The process we use to find and challenge assumptions is to simply ask why and identify the assumptions that are no longer valid or could be made invalid.  Meaning, not every assumption is a fixed thing.  We can change things around.  Some are not valid in every situation – do we need to take this step for every product or just for specific customers?  Do those policies still apply in this situation?  Can I get the policy changed?  Can I find a different way to satisfy the requirement other than the one in place?

Take, for example, Pinnacle Strategies’ work during the Gulf Oil spill.  When we were working with boom manufacturers, our consultants went to several boom manufacturers to find more capacity.  The companies usually had rigorous specifications from their customers, as the quality requirements were support usage for many years.  However, we wanted as much boom as possible, in as short of time as possible, for a short burst of intensive work.  The companies were building heavy duty products designed to meet a wide variety of situations.  The boom that was needed was for a specific environment, with specific requirements, for a short period of time.  Some features could be left out, thus reducing the time to manufacture and thus releasing extra capacity to make more.

This is our experience over and over.  There is ALWAYS more capacity than you think.  You just have to do a little digging and challenge your assumptions.

Read more about how we achieved great results by challenging the assumptions in lesson 4 in my eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7 Lessons Learned from a Disaster.

As always if, you have questions or comments please feel free to contact me by emailing me.

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In a more practical sense, if I’m a leader of an organization, how do I know my team is doing the right things?  If I’m a team member, how do I know what actions to take?

Every organization is formed for a purpose.  In order to achieve its purpose and goals, organizations develop around sub-organizations (functions) and processes that accomplish them.  These sub-organizations then have their own purpose and goals, for example; accounts payable’s goal is to ensure the bills get paid.  Presumably, each of these sub-organizations is in alignment with overall goals and objectives of the global organization.

As the organization becomes more complex, it becomes more challenging to maintain this alignment, so the organization establishes performance management systems to maintain alignment of purpose and activity among the constituent (local) organizations.  These systems are often referred to colloquially as “the measurement system” or “the metrics”.  Managers seek the relevant measurements to make decisions and drive appropriate behavior in the enterprise; whether to correct a course of action, direct a new course, or even stop.

The performance management system is the formal and informal process of measuring and responding to the organizational process to achieve its goal(s).   It creates and applies uniform standards, quantifying and managing process performance.

Here are a few things to think about.

Establish the standards.  Create a common benchmark of performance.  This can take the form of a database of work to be done, a common set of objectives, or even an agreed upon set of goals. If you don’t know what the objective is, anything will be acceptable.  So be purposeful and deliberate about determining your direction.  Essentially, the standard are the “why” of what is to be performed.

Know the process.  The process is the “what” of your process – the details that determine your progress towards success.  If you have never mapped the process or supply chain, now is the time to do it!   It’s essential to know the behaviors required and the results of those behaviors – you can’t measure what you can’t quantify.

Create decision gates. Now that you have the process mapped and can clearly articulate the steps towards the goal, you can identify where decisions need to be made.  Quantify the decision process – who can make what decisions and when escalation is required.

Identify the constraint. Now that the process is mapped and all steps are clear, you can see where the bottlenecks are and what is holding up the process or supply chain from moving faster – you can focus on the areas that are most critical.

During the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP built the largest civilian maritime fleet ever seen (over 14,000 vessels). In the haste of containing the spill, keeping detailed records were not a priority.  Equipment was rented and used with no documentation and boats were commissioned to clean oil with no record of their model or serial number.  This lack of communication and documentation became a big problem when it was time to decontaminate the cleanup vessels.  We employed these lessons to drive the process and completed a task in less than six months that was originally estimated to take years. These lessons worked in the worst conditions, imagine how they could help you now.

Read how we achieved great results by applying uniformed standards in lesson 6 in our eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7 Lessons Learned from a Disaster.

Also, have a look at some of our thought leadership on performance management here.

As always if, you have questions or comments please feel free to contact me by emailing me.

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Projects can have a single date for completion and for important milestones like progress payments, client reviews, feature releases, etc.  These are the dates.  The important ones.  Where we get paid.

Managing (and meeting) the dates and deadlines in a project is touchy even for the teams that see each other every day.  In a previous post, I talked about the communication problems of distributed teams and the importance of managing content.  Dates are often the most important bit of content to get right.

Distributed teams have a much more difficult time with due dates and deadlines for the following reasons:

Haystack Syndrome: The amount of data, unimportant and important, coming from multiple sources overwhelms team members so no one can form an accurate picture of the true progress.  How to find the most critical bit of information that affects the deadline?  Project teams spend a lot of time sifting through data, working to identify the most important.  When they’re far apart, just finding the data is a challenge.

Reliability:  Project managers need to ensure that their whole team has the correct information that affects delivery and deadline dates.  Team members in distributed teams sometimes withhold information, obscure the real situation, or delay providing negative information, hoping that the situation gets better.  This is particularly true working in cross-cultural teams, where delivering bad news can create a problem in a local team.

Inconsistent vision:  Most people work in their own bubble of their own tasks, unaware of the big picture of the project and how their work fits.  What is important is not always recognized.

Managers of remote teams are often frustrated with their inability to get traction on meeting deadlines.  The challenge is to get the entire team focused on a common set of objectives – including dates.  If you’re not present in the work area, the number of options is fairly limited.

Project managers need a tool one that provides a

-Single consistent window for seeing progress across all task elements and locations, in real time

– Shared view of project status

-Shared view of the obstacles

-Shared understanding of the work to be done to overcome those obstacles

One of our clients found itself a victim of success, struggling to meet critical delivery due dates for a new product that had much higher demand than forecasted.  The company had components from 5 different suppliers tested by 2 different subcontractors.  Part of the solution we helped them implement was a visual project board.  It was good for the local team, but the need for remote collaboration was critical.  We developed and implemented a date – driven visual project board web app that allowed every team member at remote suppliers to see the project’s status, identify the critical bits of information, and collaborate (without losing face) on accelerating progress.  Getting everyone on board with the same deadlines was a critical element in the success of the project, which in the end resulted in improvements in product flow and delivery reliability.  They also found 5 times more capacity, quadrupled output, and reduced lead-time by 23%.  And of course, most importantly, the delivery dates were achieved.  And they got paid.  A lot.  You can get more detail on the viewpoint case study here

Read more about our solutions to the problems distributed teams face and other success stories of the solution implementations in our new eBook, Remote Control: How to Get Productive Teamwork from Distributed Project Teams

The post Imposing a Common Deadline on Remote Teams appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Projects can have a single date for completion and for important milestones like progress payments, client reviews, feature releases, etc.  These are the dates.  The important ones.  Where we get paid.

Managing (and meeting) the dates and deadlines in a project is touchy even for the teams that see each other every day.  In a previous post, I talked about the communication problems of distributed teams and the importance of managing content.  Dates are often the most important bit of content to get right.

Distributed teams have a much more difficult time with due dates and deadlines for the following reasons:

Haystack Syndrome: The amount of data, unimportant and important, coming from multiple sources overwhelms team members so no one can form an accurate picture of the true progress.  How to find the most critical bit of information that affects the deadline?  Project teams spend a lot of time sifting through data, working to identify the most important.  When they’re far apart, just finding the data is a challenge.

Reliability:  Project managers need to ensure that their whole team has the correct information that affects delivery and deadline dates.  Team members in distributed teams sometimes withhold information, obscure the real situation, or delay providing negative information, hoping that the situation gets better.  This is particularly true working in cross-cultural teams, where delivering bad news can create a problem in a local team.

Inconsistent vision:  Most people work in their own bubble of their own tasks, unaware of the big picture of the project and how their work fits.  What is important is not always recognized.

Managers of remote teams are often frustrated with their inability to get traction on meeting deadlines.  The challenge is to get the entire team focused on a common set of objectives – including dates.  If you’re not present in the work area, the number of options is fairly limited.

Project managers need a tool one that provides a

-Single consistent window for seeing progress across all task elements and locations, in real time

– Shared view of project status

-Shared view of the obstacles

-Shared understanding of the work to be done to overcome those obstacles

One of our clients found itself a victim of success, struggling to meet critical delivery due dates for a new product that had much higher demand than forecasted.  The company had components from 5 different suppliers tested by 2 different subcontractors.  Part of the solution we helped them implement was a visual project board.  It was good for the local team, but the need for remote collaboration was critical.  We developed and implemented a date – driven visual project board web app that allowed every team member at remote suppliers to see the project’s status, identify the critical bits of information, and collaborate (without losing face) on accelerating progress.  Getting everyone on board with the same deadlines was a critical element in the success of the project, which in the end resulted in improvements in product flow and delivery reliability.  They also found 5 times more capacity, quadrupled output, and reduced lead-time by 23%.  And of course, most importantly, the delivery dates were achieved.  And they got paid.  A lot.  You can get more detail on the viewpoint case study here

Read more about our solutions to the problems distributed teams face and other success stories of the solution implementations in our new eBook, Remote Control: How to Get Productive Teamwork from Distributed Project Teams

The post Imposing a Common Deadline on Remote Teams appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Why is this so important? Can’t we just start with, say, “The goal is to deliver machine X”?

Unfortunately, such vaguely defined goals leave a lot of room for interpretation and chances are different people will come up with different interpretations to fill their perceived void. Others get lost and lose their motivation.

In our practice we often find that many problems in project planning and execution have to do with the lack of a clearly defined goal, turning a project to a plaything of change requests, complete “rescoping”, unclear priorities, demand management and similar things. How are you supposed to deliver in time, within budget and scope under such conditions?

To avoid these issues, start with a clear definition of the project’s goal that is consensus among stakeholders. You will find a simple tool to be helpful. It is called ODSC, for Objectives, Deliverables and Success Criteria for three goal dimensions. It is powerful for verbalizing and agreeing on a project’s target.

Before we go into that – who do I mean by “stakeholder”? You should go rather wide than narrow and involve project leaders, managers, members, senior management, even customers and suppliers.

Objectives – The first dimension states the purpose or objectives of the project. Why is it important to the stakeholders? What problem or demand is to be addressed by the project? Would the objective solve this problem or meet the demand? Always take the throughput (performance) of your organization into account.

A discussion will reveal many different facets, in New Product Development these may range from turning a technological breakthrough into a product, to increased profit margins, to opportunities for fostering the corporate image. To ensure a broad perspective and consensus from all stakeholders, you should look for six perspectives: financial, process, employees, customers, corporate culture/philosphy, and corporate social responsibility. So the objectives of our example may be:

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Having been the individual responsible for many such initiatives, I’ve learned (often the hard way) that it pays to “stack the deck” at the beginning of the project while enthusiasm still runs high.  While most of the suggestions in this article are in no way revolutionary or ground-breaking, thinking about how each of these complimentary tasks contributes to “stacking the deck” is most certainly a worthwhile exercise in building a good foundation for a successful initiative.

Commit to the Effort in a Project Charter.  A Project Charter is a document typically signed by at least the Initiative’s Sponsor (person allocating budget) and the Project Manager (person responsible for planning and executing).  The Charter identifies things like project scope, project objectives, major stakeholders, and team member authority levels.  Additionally, I strongly recommend that your charter articulate the vision of the end-state as well as the metrics upon which the effort’s success will ultimately be judged. Risk areas that could impact your success should also be highlighted.

Having a signed project charter has saved my ‘back side’ on a couple different occasions.  Especially on longer projects, a Charter can be used to remind those with short memories what they signed up for at the project start and help motivate them to play their part.  It is also a useful document to align players that may change after the project gets kicked off.  Identifying risk areas such as this up front prepares you to negotiate contingencies for when Murphy strikes.

Conduct a Stakeholder Analysis.  Going through a written exercise of identifying the stakeholders and understanding how the project will affect each person and their role in the organization is time well-spent.  A major part of a Project Manager’s job is to convince others to accomplish project-related tasks.  In today’s matrix organizations, the Project Manager often does not have direct authority over many of the resources assigned to the team and must negotiate conflicting priorities and/or objectives.  A Stakeholder Analysis helps one articulate what these priorities and competing objectives might be.

As a practical matter, I typically put together a matrix for my personal use (or the use of a select few trusted team members) that lists what is important to each impacted stakeholder and what my engagement plan with them will be.  This is especially important for those who may perceive the initiative as threatening (or maybe just cumbersome), but you should also do this for those who will be positively impacted.

Develop a Formalized Project Plan.  In a major initiative, a formalized project plan can be your best friend.  A good project plan will break down the project into bite-sized tasks for your team members and establish the linkages that tie the work together.  It will also guide progress with estimated task durations and strategically placed buffers to account for the uncertainties that are inherent to project work.

There are undoubtedly some guys who ‘have done this a 1000 times’ and can successfully pull off a successful major initiative with an ad-hoc management style.  For those of us who are less risk averse and want to ‘stack the deck’ in our favor, a good project plan will serve as an effective communication vehicle both early in the project and later….after things haven’t gone according to plan.

Read some of our case studies here to see how these implementation realities helped achieve great results for our clients.

Cory TerEick is Pinnacle Strategies’ Engagement Manager specializing in the Oil & Gas and Aerospace industries. In this role, he is responsible for delivering results and sales while leading an international team of expert consultants working at various client sites around the world.  Mr. TerEick is a results-oriented problem solver with a track record of helping clients overcome significant challenges and driving high impact, transformational change. He is a recognized expert in advanced project management methodologies as well as mega-project design, execution, and turn-around. Mr. TerEick is especially skilled in operations diagnostics, process re-engineering, and portfolio-level strategic planning.

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Many engineering projects suffer from the same problem.  In a hurry to start, we begin the work as soon as it appears on our desk. But too often, the task takes longer because we don’t have everything to finish.  Worse, we don’t know we can’t finish (who knew we were out of drywall anchors?) either because we didn’t check or we didn’t fully unpack the task before we started.

False starts are worth addressing because of what the do to the workflow.  Multiply the starting and stopping effect by the quantity of your engineers, designers, drafters, buyers, etc., and you’ll see the delays and rework cascading across all of your projects.

It’s such an obvious thing, isn’t it?   But what’s obvious and sensible is not what we find in the workplace.  The reason – especially in knowledge work – is that it’s difficult to incorporate sensible and obvious into a coherent system of project management.

Most people don’t see it a problem, just a fact of life.  From a project systems point of view, it’s hard to see that false starts is the cause of many of your project problems:

Loss of Momentum: My previous post discussed the problem with too much work in process.  False starts exacerbate the effects – false starts inflate WIP even worse, it can’t move!

Rework:  Without the full kit of information to finish, tasks are often completed incorrectly.  Going back and redoing the work takes time and consumes additional resources, putting other work behind schedule and impacting not only that project, but also potentially the other projects that use those resources.

Extra Costs: Doing it twice or three times.  Using resources more and longer than you had planned to.  This time and those resources have to be purchased.  Working overtime to catch up.  Temporary workers.  Tiger teams. Not free.  Not planned.

False starts are much more than a nuisance; they are a systemic problem affecting your entire project management process.

What to do about it? First, make a decision.  No task starts unless it can finish.  This changes the emphasis in the organization from keeping busy to preparing to succeed.

Next, resource the preparation activity.  Someone has to be accountable for full kit and clean start, someone has to check that the work is ready to start.

Then, focus on identifying what is needed to finish a task.  That in itself will shift your team’s thinking, give some thought to establishing hand off criteria; determining when it is good enough to say “done”.

In our work with project teams, we see false starts often: in projects, in manufacturing.  For example, at one manufacturer, shortages to final assembly were high and the receiving department didn’t want to stop the line. Crews were constantly deployed out of position, working overtime, crowding stations, creating rework and scrap.

By eliminating the shortages, the clean start, the line accelerated and overtime declined substantially.   You can read more about this case here.

Although the example is of a manufacturer, the concept applies to any workflow.  The practice of a clean start with a full kit is so important to overall project performance that it has become central to our project and workflow transformation engagements.  It moves teams from merely being busy, to being effective.  It changes the way they look at their work.

It’s a simple thing you can do that will transform your portfolio performance.  Decide.

Read more about the false starts in our eBook Blindsided! Five Invisible Project Threats Successful Managers Must See.

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The problem with the “start early, finish early” approach is that when you’re dealing with several projects, everything starts early and the system becomes clogged.  The project management system looks like the freeways during rush hour (2 analogies in 2 paragraphs!).  The system becomes bogged down, slows down, and projects take longer and longer.

From a resource view, there’s a stack of work to be done.  How to choose the right task?  The one I enjoy most?  The one that we discussed in the project meeting today?  The small task I can wrap up before the weekend?  So many choices, each resource choosing the correct sequence.

Undoubtedly, the “wrong” work will be done.  Tasks will be started with incomplete information, resulting in starting and stopping, waiting, and rework.  The project team spends its time sorting through the piles of work for the resources, and then resorting as new information arrives.  Then the resources are forced to stop and start again, because the teams never quite get it exactly right.

The result?  A loss of productivity.  Increasing project lengths.  Expensive expediting efforts.  More management attention required.  Unhappy customers.  Unhappy people.

What can you do?   Certainly the synchronization task is complex when you have many projects, but you can clear the road a bit so you can see the way.  Manage and limit the amount of work in the pipeline.   Simple, yet difficult.  Still, it must be done.

Managing the WIP:

Reduces the multitasking.  With less work in the system, there is less sorting and resorting, less stopping and starting due to priority errors

Reduces management attention.  Less work, faster progress, no more managing the piles.

Reduces rework.  With less work in the system, attention can be turned to emphasizing clean starts

Reduces average project lead times.  Fewer queues, less wait time, more time spent on the project.

A couple things to keep in mind as you set your WIP level:

You can make gradual reductions; reduce by 25% if you’re worried about something bad happening.  I’d start a with 50% reduction.

Watch your resource engagement; sometimes there is work in the system you’re not even aware of, like customers calling your engineers or developers directly.

Make sure it’s clear who sets the priorities for work.  Controlling the release of new work into the system is both a capacity and priority management task.

To read more about the unlimited “progress” and other invisible threats to managers, read our new eBook Blindsided! Five Invisible Project Threats Successful Managers Must See.

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