project management – Page 6 – Projects in Less Time

How to Get Productive Project Teamwork from Distributed Teams

Managing any project team can be challenging. Managing a distributed team is a challenge cubed. In any project, coordinating the workflow among your resources is almost always difficult. When multiple teams are involved, that challenge is multiplied; if those teams are distributed across various campuses, countries or even continents, the effect on complexity is exponential, […]

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Blind Spot 5 – Misleading Metrics

Eli Goldratt wrote “Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I behave. If you measure me in an illogical way…do not complain about illogical behavior.” People will take actions based on how they believe they are being measured and managers get what they measure. I’ve written on the topic of measurements

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The Power of Visualization

Continuous Improvement, project management / Mark Woeppel / 4 minutes of reading

I was recently posting a Visual Portfolio Board for a customer and before we were even finished posting all the elements, the board had already begun providing real value. Just seeing the big picture of an entire portfolio of projects allowed the managers to understand relationships and issues they had never seen or understood before. In

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Where Are You Heading?

Continuous Improvement, Implementation, leadership, project management / Mark Woeppel / 4 minutes of reading

Have you ever worked on a project that didn’t have a clear goal? By “clear goal” I mean one that is fully defined, stable, lacks any ambiguity and is shared among the relevant stakeholders. Why is this so important? Can’t we just start with, say, “The goal is to deliver machine X”? Unfortunately, such vaguely defined

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Management Blind Spot 4 – False Starts

Implementation, project management, Supply Chain Management / Mark Woeppel / 4 minutes of reading

Everyone has started a project only to realize that you do not have all the items you need to finish. Drywall anchors – picture hangers – spackle – no matter the project, it’s the little things that get you hung up. So you either have to stop and run back to the store so you can

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Blind Spot 3: Put the Whip to WIP

Critical Chain, Implementation, project management / Mark Woeppel / 3 minutes of reading

The sooner you start, the sooner you finish, right? Perhaps you remember the tale of the tortoise and the hare. Sure, the hare is fast, but in the end, it’s the tortoise’s steady progress that wins the race. In a project management sense, it’s not the speed of the individual project that matters; it’s the speed

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Blind Spot 2 – Death by Meeting

Implementation, Lean Manufacturing, project management / Mark Woeppel / 3 minutes of reading

Ugh. Another project meeting. We’ve all been there, annoyed when our reminder goes off (if you still use them!) reminding us of our 8th meeting of the day. We’re annoyed because there are so many meetings and these meetings never seem to get anywhere. The same stories, the same excuses. Well, at the close of the

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Blindsided! Conflicting Priorities in Projects

Implementation, performance management, project management / Mark Woeppel / 3 minutes of reading

This week, I am starting new series of postings that showcase some of the most common blind spots to successful project execution. I call these the blind spots because most managers are not even aware that these menaces are the true problem. The symptoms are obvious, but the root problem is hidden. The first cause is

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Mass-producing Frustration: Why “Good Planning” Often Leads to Failed Projects

Critical Chain, Implementation, project management / Mark Woeppel / project execution, project management, project planning / 5 minutes of reading

In engineering offices and construction trailers all over the world, promising projects suffer delays, cost overruns and missed output projections. In response, the collective finger of blame points to everyone’s favorite excuse: “bad planning.” If bad planning is responsible for failure, it stands to reason that “good planning” should be the savior. And by “good planning,”

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Visual Project Management

Critical Chain, Implementation, project management / Mark Woeppel / 2 minutes of reading

We’ve been playing with a new concept in project management. This new approach blends lean concepts, visual management, and theory of constraints. It’s a visual project management process, with a display of all the projects in the portfolio. We’re calling it ViewPoint. What’s interesting about this approach to project management is that it involves the project

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