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.

The post Manage and Align Performance by Applying Uniform Standards appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

The glue that holds this whole reliable deliver process all together, as well as the last part of the process, is the reconciliation processes. At the top level, the sales and operations planning (S&OP) process integrates the demand and capacity planning for the business. The schedule approval process is the key to getting buy-in, ensuring timely decisions are made and early action is taken to satisfy the customer.

The processes are owned by the process owners – production for the execution schedules and the general manager for the sales and operations plan. The master scheduler manages the processes, being accountable to the process owners.

The essence of the process is to have management reconcile the demand forecast to the planned capacity, making adjustments as the business requires, BEFORE the customer is adversely affected.

Demand Forecasting

Producing a demand forecast allows you to build a model of your business. Producing a forecast of capacity requirements allows you to see what types and approximately how much capacity you’ll need. Once you have a demand forecast, you can identify what types of equipment and skills you’ll need to satisfy the market.

Having a forecast is not the same as having a plan. The forecast and your ability to respond to it have to be reconciled. Some trade-offs are inevitable. You can’t build a new plant in a day; you can’t open a new market in a month. Therefore, a process must be implemented to rationally reconcile the demands of the market with the availability of the capacity.

Implementation

Now that we have finished discussing all the parts of a reliable delivery process, I need to give some advice about implementation. The Maximum Flow System has been proven in plants all over the world. However, it is a radical change in how the process is managed. Not everyone gets the results.

There are two prerequisites for a successful implementation:

Management maturity: management must be prepared to make the commitment to change and see it through. They must be able to lead the implementation through word and deed.

Mature sales organization: the organization must be ready to capitalize on the improvement in operations. The sales organization must be ready to be aggressive in capturing the additional orders based on shorter lead times and improved reliability.

Results

Traditionally, managers devote little attention to how the order fulfillment process is managed. As a result, the process is chaotic, inefficient and simply doesn’t do its main job of delivering product to customers on time.

The Maximum Flow System causes people to synchronize their day to day efforts towards the delivery requirements of the customer, which results in on time delivery of the customer’s order, with less effort and management intervention.

In addition, the system delivers significant financial benefits. Other benefits include increased throughput, reduction of lead times, improved labor productivity, more sales, and improved cash flow.

This is the end of my blog series focused on building a reliable delivery system. Check out the full white paper titled “How to Build a Reliable Delivery Process” here.

The post How to Build a Reliable Delivery Process: Sales and Operations Planning appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Even though we think multitasking is good, research shows just the opposite. Research shows that dividing attention across multiple activities is taxing on the brain and often comes at the expense of real productivity. As much as a 40% loss. And it can also increase stress for the people multitasking, making your employees frustrated and stressed while at work. To do tasks that are complicated, you are either going to have to slow down or you are going to start making mistakes, causing each task to take longer.

Watch the video below to learn more about the dangers of multitasking and what you can do to stop your resources (and you!) from multitasking.

Multitasking is Evil from Pinnacle Strategies on Vimeo.

Learn more about how to increase project velocity and improve resource productivity by reading some of our ebooks or watching more of our videos. In particular, look at our Blindsided! Five Invisible Project Threats Successful Managers Must See ebook, that includes very practical information you can use today that will improve your projects.

The post Multitasking is Evil – The Number One Killer of Project Productivity appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Let’s get rid of the room.

Let’s get rid of the chairs.

While we’re at it, let’s get rid of meetings – or at least what we traditionally think of as meetings.

We will gather, but here’s what we won’t do any more:
• We won’t point fingers.
• We won’t assign blame.
• We won’t ask “why” things have gone wrong.
• We won’t dwell on the past.

Stand up for the future

We use a hallway because we want people to stand – pretty soon, they’ll be on the move, returning to their work with a clear understanding of what, exactly, they should be working on. We use a whiteboard or a strip of paper because they are flexible: we can tailor our visualization to the exact needs of our project.

What’s your process?

The board is the center of everyone’s attention. So what will they see?

First, you need to look into your process: step by step, what has to be done to complete a project from beginning to end? What are the inflection points for progress, the hand-offs that must be made, the transitions that require decision-making?

While project processes may be complex, for the purposes of efficient execution, you want a summary that distills the process to its most important steps. For one engineering group, it was sufficient to define it in four stages, each of which was represented by a column on its whiteboard:
1. Design
2. Draft
3. Check
4. Approval

More often, the process is more complex. In the figure below, there are ten steps to completion, including Technical Clarification, Job Creation, 3D Concepts, 3D Modeling, Design Freeze Review, Detailed Drawings, etc.

Already eye-opening?

Sounds simple, right? But for many teams, even listing the steps proves illuminating; for it may be the first time anyone has searched out and articulated the project process.

More importantly, for the team that gathers around the board, it may be the first time that they’ve seen beyond their project portions to visualize the entire project process. Notice that we haven’t completed the board – but we’ve already created a context that hadn’t been visible before.

Success Secret #1

In an upcoming step, team members will use “sticky” notes or tags to assign their current work tasks to the appropriate columns. Often, two wonderful things will happen: 1) a column will be blank –sometimes this is appropriate, but sometimes it suggests that that a step in the process is irrelevant and, therefore, can be removed from the board; and 2) team members might have left-over tasks in their hands, indicating that a process column is missing. In fact, one of the first major contributions of visualization is that it often exposes the hidden process steps and work that have previously gone unmanaged.

This is chapter three and four of our newest ebook, Visualizing Projects. Do you want to learn more? Download the full ebook here.

Learn more about Visual Project Management and join the discussion on LinkedIn by joining the Visual Project Management group.

The post Visualizing Projects: Start With a Clean Slate appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

The more contractors or departments involved in a project, the more chances for variation and, often, more confusion.  There is always the opportunity for misalignment and miscommunication.   The larger the organization, the more opportunity for missing cues on priorities and direction.  For the process owner, the challenge is to align a team to drive progress towards the goal.  For the team member, there is the question of identifying the actions that will drive progress of the entire system; the problem of managing and aligning performance at the global level and local level.  To put it more simply, how does the actor at the local level know which actions to take to drive the system towards the global objective?  How does the process owner know if his team is doing the right things to move progress towards the goal?

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.

The post Manage and Align Performance by Applying Uniform Standards appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Often, when output needs to increase, we learn that this heightened sense of urgency creates rushed decisions and frantic behavior.  This leads to the obvious and time-tested band-ads: adding another shift, throwing overtime at the problem or buying another machine.  As many of us know, the costs of a new machine or the possibility of adding yet another shift quickly adds up costs or may not even be possible.  So how to squeeze more from the system when it seems like it’s maxed out?

Look for the part of the process that dictates the output of the process.  The part of a that is most likely to set the pace for the whole line and impose delays everywhere else.  This is the constraint, or the “drum” of the process, as it set the pace of output.

Identifying the constraint begins with one step – careful observation.  We need to analyze the process to find the bottleneck.  Ask such questions as “why do we feel that it is impossible to increase production capacity?” or “what step holds up the rest of the line?” Observe the process to see what is going on.  Just the act of asking “Why?” will point to a solution.

When there is extreme pressure to make improvements and increase capacity, wait on implementation until the system is understood.  While this seems counterproductive given the timelines we usually encounter, you’ll make more progress stepping back and working from understanding.  By identifying where first to act, you will be able to act effectively to make a bigger, more certain impact on process performance.

When Pinnacle Strategies was called by BP to help increase output critical components to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we needed to find a way to have the manufacturers increase output even after they had “maxed out” their production.  At each plant we visited, management felt that it was impossible to squeeze more output from their plants.  These manufacturers were under pressure to increase output, and with the guarantee of selling what they produce, there was also strong incentive to increase output.

Read how we looked for the drum and had amazing results in the first lesson of our eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7Lessons Learned from a Disaster. 

The post Make the Invisible Visible – Look for “The Drum” appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.