The post Amplify Your Team’s Productivity with Visual Project Management appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

As we grew older, maybe we got involved in sports or group activities. We were taught an easy mantra: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work.

At some point once we entered the real world however, we lost sight of these simple ideals. We quit articulating the things we need, we quit working together to achieve our goals… we stopped communicating all together. And yet somehow we’re surprised that our projects are running weeks to months to years behind schedule, and we can’t get anything done on time.  And it’s not fun anymore.

Successful projects stem from basic concepts similar to the ones you learned as a child. These help improve productivity and reduce project duration. Together, they comprise the Basic Collaboration level of the Viewpoint Project Execution Maturity Model, pictured below.

Basic Collaboration is pivotal to successful projects. It is the simplest level, but it creates the foundation for all the others to build upon, and is instrumental to boosting on time delivery, task velocity and productivity as a whole by killing the biggest threat to project success: multitasking.

I’ve written about each of the four elements involved individually, but here’s a refresher, and next week, we’ll move on to the middle level of the model, Improved Coordination.

Collaborative Execution

For projects to be truly successfully executed, informed collaboration is essential. Both managers and team members must be able to see past the limits of their individual tasks, to the overall direction of the project. They need a map. The roles, reporting and accountability must be crystal clear (Who’s going to drive?), so that everyone knows what needs to get done today, instead of driving through the rear view mirror. Collaborative Execution makes tasks in the team’s work visible to everyone involved, allowing the team to be truly informed so they can collaborate.

Functional Alignment

Everyone comes to a project with objectives from their individual function. Functional alignment takes people out of their organizational silos and puts them on the project. Each member of the team acts in the best interest of the project as a whole, instead of their individual silo’s objective, eliminating conflict between departments or teams, and accelerating decision making and action. They need to know the right behavior. Functional alignment happens when every single person involved in the project is focused on the project’s overarching goals, rather than their own silo’s objectives.

Priority Control

Managing priorities is essential to eliminate multitasking and achieving Basic Collaboration. By collaborating more effectively and aligning functional goals, you can easily create a priority system that is transparent and simple.  Through a simple priority system, teams can ensure that people work on the right tasks at the right time and most importantly, everyone’s working on the most important priority to advance the project.

Control WIP

A very important aspect to reduce project duration is to eliminate the task wait time in the workflow. Establishing control over work in progress is the final building block of Basic Collaboration. Managers must establish criteria to control tasks to ensure that nothing is started that cannot be finished. By controlling the amount of work in the queue, teams simplify the task of project management. They can have clear criteria for work release, have clear methods for managing work, and have established targets for total system work in progress.

These four elements work together to lay the building blocks for ultimate project success to reduce project duration, deliver on time, and boost productivity.

Learn how one of our clients recently implemented the Basic Collaboration level of the Viewpoint Project Execution Maturity Model and increased their productivity by 360% and on-time delivery by 20%. Download the case here.

The post Back to Basics: Building Blocks for Successful Project Delivery appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

In kindergarten, we learned some simple skills: how to work together, how to share, how to communicate with others, how to be kind and make friends. They were basic social skills that would help us in the long run to get what we want out of life and out of our work.

As we grew older, maybe we got involved in sports or group activities. We were taught an easy mantra: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work.

At some point once we entered the real world however, we lost sight of these simple ideals. We quit articulating the things we need, we quit working together to achieve our goals… we stopped communicating all together. And yet somehow we’re surprised that our projects are running weeks to months to years behind schedule, and we can’t get anything done on time.  And it’s not fun anymore.

Successful projects stem from basic concepts similar to the ones you learned as a child. These help improve productivity and reduce project duration. Together, they comprise the Basic Collaboration level of the Viewpoint Project Execution Maturity Model, pictured below.

Basic Collaboration is pivotal to successful projects. It is the simplest level, but it creates the foundation for all the others to build upon, and is instrumental to boosting on time delivery, task velocity and productivity as a whole by killing the biggest threat to project success: multitasking.

I’ve written about each of the four elements involved individually, but here’s a refresher, and next week, we’ll move on to the middle level of the model, Improved Coordination.

Collaborative Execution

For projects to be truly successfully executed, informed collaboration is essential. Both managers and team members must be able to see past the limits of their individual tasks, to the overall direction of the project. They need a map. The roles, reporting and accountability must be crystal clear (Who’s going to drive?), so that everyone knows what needs to get done today, instead of driving through the rear view mirror. Collaborative Execution makes tasks in the team’s work visible to everyone involved, allowing the team to be truly informed so they can collaborate.

Functional Alignment

Everyone comes to a project with objectives from their individual function. Functional alignment takes people out of their organizational silos and puts them on the project. Each member of the team acts in the best interest of the project as a whole, instead of their individual silo’s objective, eliminating conflict between departments or teams, and accelerating decision making and action. They need to know the right behavior. Functional alignment happens when every single person involved in the project is focused on the project’s overarching goals, rather than their own silo’s objectives.

Priority Control

Managing priorities is essential to eliminate multitasking and achieving Basic Collaboration. By collaborating more effectively and aligning functional goals, you can easily create a priority system that is transparent and simple.  Through a simple priority system, teams can ensure that people work on the right tasks at the right time and most importantly, everyone’s working on the most important priority to advance the project.

Control WIP

A very important aspect to reduce project duration is to eliminate the task wait time in the workflow. Establishing control over work in progress is the final building block of Basic Collaboration. Managers must establish criteria to control tasks to ensure that nothing is started that cannot be finished. By controlling the amount of work in the queue, teams simplify the task of project management. They can have clear criteria for work release, have clear methods for managing work, and have established targets for total system work in progress.

These four elements work together to lay the building blocks for ultimate project success to reduce project duration, deliver on time, and boost productivity.

Learn how one of our clients recently implemented the Basic Collaboration level of the Viewpoint Project Execution Maturity Model and increased their productivity by 360% and on-time delivery by 20%. Download the case here.

The post Back to Basics: Building Blocks for Successful Project Delivery appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

There are a lot of moving parts, people and processes. Your projects may not be planned properly. Your communication may not be very good. Your resources might not be as productive as they could be. Maybe there are no standardized processes, and everyone is winging it.

Which are affecting YOUR projects?

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Project Delivery Processes

The Project Execution Maturity Model (PEMM), which is pictured above, is the key to understanding the basic behaviors and processes that dictate the effectiveness of your execution. It lays out a path from ad hoc processes, to systematic and disciplined execution.

Knowing where your organization stands in the model will help you target the critical areas that will make a difference today. If you’re doing a process transformation, the PEMM guides you as it progresses from local, ad hoc execution, to fully assimilated, repeatable processes that systematically deliver desirable and deliberate results from project to project.

Each level of maturity reflects an organization’s ability to manage activity and time across all areas of the projects, with movement from level to level resulting in significant strategic gains, from improved rate of task completion and overall productivity, to increased timely delivery and reduced costs.

Where do you fit on the spectrum?

Understanding the Project Execution Maturity Model is step one, but understanding where you fit within it is essential to actually improving your ability to deliver on-time and on-cost project performance consistently.

If you’re wondering why your projects are late or over budget, the Project Execution Maturity Model Assessment will help you find the gaps, clearly identify the targets for improvement, and provide a structure to move forward and start improving your results.

Change with Confidence

We have created an assessment instrument – a diagnostic – to measure your processes that drive on time delivery and place you on the maturity spectrum so you can define an actionable path forward, and giving you confidence in the direction you’re going.

Taking advantage of the ideas and behaviors set out in the PEMM helps organizations achieve:

-Better Collaboration between team members, regardless of location
-Simplification of management Improved synchronization of work
-Improved situational awareness
-Quicker responses to problems
-Increased productivity

And the best part? Organizations who embrace the PEMM make huge strides to lower costs, shorten project durations, and consistently and reliably deliver, every time.

The post Why Are Your Projects Always Late? Deliver on time with the Project Execution Maturity Model appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Not More Planning, More Cooperation

For too long, project managers have believed that the right planning leads to the right results.

Yet time after time, independent research shows that the current approach to project management fails to produce the outcomes managers expect – and clients want. Researchers report:

• A staggering 39% of IT projects with budgets over $10 million USD fail.
• Only 2.5% of the companies successfully complete their projects.
• 44% of IT projects run over budget, 7% run over time, and 56% deliver less value than expected.
• Most other projects typically overrun the schedule by almost 70%.

What’s Going Wrong?

Despite the emphasis on better planning processes and improving project skills, project performance is not getting better.

We know that between planning and execution, there is a gap – a wide gap. Inside that gap, there are conflicting priorities…a multiplicity of tasks in progress…a misalignment between what is measured and what is meaningful…a failure to identify and adjust for risks…undetected obstacles and bottlenecks that block progress…and more ground-level factors that have not been, and cannot be addressed by planning alone.

The key to improving project performance is not planning, but execution – creating and sustaining a culture where the right processes and behaviors deliver consistent, quantifiable results.

However, there is a gap between project execution practice and project execution knowledge. It is relatively unexplored area in the project management body of knowledge. For organizations that want to improve their performance, there are three questions:
– Is there a best execution practices?
– What are the principles we can employ?
– How do we put them into practice?

Fortunately, the processes and behaviors to deliver consistent results are well defined and quantified, forming the Project Execution Maturity Model.

The Model proposes three levels of execution capability:

• Basic Collaboration,
• Improved Coordination, and
• Integrated Planning and Execution

Each level of maturity is a reflection of the organization’s capability to manage activity and time, from local teams and the now to remote teams and portfolio life.

Collaboration During Execution

The main emphasis of Basic Collaboration is task velocity or flow. Improved Coordination emphasizes meeting deadlines and extends capabilities to remote work groups. Once an organization has established a foundation of appropriate behaviors and focused communications, Integrated Planning and Execution focuses on creating and executing detailed, optimized plans.

Achieving greater maturity drives greater value. Our firm’s research since 2011 shows that moving from ad-hoc to Basic Collaboration significantly increases financial performance:

• Productivity increases by more than 20%.
• The rate of value creation (project completion) grows by nearly 30%.
• Significant gains in on-time deliver performance are achieved.

Similarly, further gains can be found as the organization moves to Improved Coordination and Integrated Planning and Execution.

In the next few blog posts, I identify the twelve elements that drive effective project execution excellence, giving you a measurable means to assess your status, to target areas of improvement, and to make meaningful progress in the way you deliver projects.

Get a preview and learn more by reading my free eBook “Why Do Projects Succeed or Fail? The Project Execution Maturity Model.”

The post Why Do Projects Succeed or Fail? appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.