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Let’s suppose your teams are delivering one project every other month; that’s 6 projects annually.

If each project is worth $600k, your revenue over the year would be $3.6MM

Before I go on, think for a moment about your car. Or cars in general. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors said, “Most cars are only in use by their owners for 5% to 10% of the day.”

Just like cars, projects are idle most of the time. The work or tasks are not active, they are waiting.

The project duration is comprised mostly of waiting, not working. Waiting for the next job, waiting for approvals, waiting for information; waiting, not working

What would happen if you concentrated your resources to focus on a single project at a time? What if they focused on finishing projects, not finishing tasks?

You could reduce all project durations, and do more.

If you made a modest change – simply changing priorities to focus effort on the completion of the critical chain, you could reduce durations by a third or even half.

Your $3.6MM in revenue could climb to $5.4MM or even $7.2MM. With the same resources.

This is not a fantasy; I have seen this many time with many of our clients, using ViewPoint Visual Project Management and the Theory of Constraints.

FMC Technologies had many remote teams and getting collaboration between design, supply chain, and production was critical to their success. They reduced their project duration from 31 days to 8, increasing shipments 326%, with the corresponding profit increase.

This just one example of real world success. Focus on completions – get more done. Ship more. Bill more. Earn more.

Time is money.

The post Is Time Equal to Money? Part 2 appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Do you have genuine insight into your project’s delivery risk? By risk, I mean, do you know the chance your project has of delivering on time or late? By genuine, I mean, something quantifiable?

Most of the time, managers look at task completion dates or schedule compliance to judge the risk. If you’re on planned timeline, your risk is deemed to be low. The problem is that you can’t know if that plan is a good one. You only know it’s good so far. Good, in that your progress matches the plan. What if the plan is padded with extra time? Your team is only going as fast as the plan tells them to. What if there is risk later in the project? Only “so far” won’t tell you if you can speed up, or if there’s an obstacle ahead.
 
Most managers don’t know if their project will be on time, until it’s not.
 
I’ve written before about the most important measurements in projects and the behavior you need to deliver on time: proactive and speedy resolution of problems. These metrics are based on the premise that behavior is the precursor to results. If you want to know if you’re going to get the results, you should measure the behaviors.
 
Managers are at the core, influencers of behavior. What needs to be done, is done by people, behaving in specific ways to accomplish specific results. Managers exert influence to:

• Increase some behaviors
• Decrease some behaviors
• Initiate new behaviors

No matter what you’re doing, whether you’re improving quality or increasing productivity, it’s the behavior that drives that result. I’ve often said the best project managers are the best negotiators. The best project managers are the ones that know what behavior they need and are successful at getting it.
 
Do you know the behaviors that will deliver projects on time?
 
If you don’t know the behaviors, you can’t measure them; you can’t influence them.
 
Any project worth doing is worth doing quickly. Shorter completion times mean more revenue, sooner. If your project is not moving, the risk of late completion is rising. Therefore, the on-time behaviors to watch and measure are geared towards speed and flow
Several people have roles in keep the project moving: Executives, Project Managers, Functional (Task) Managers, and the Resources that are doing the work.
 
In this post, I’m focusing on just the executives. The owners of the projects. It’s the project manager’s responsibility to manage their behavior, as much as it is to manage the activity of the project.
 
The most critical on time behaviors for the executives are around engagement. They are engaged in the process of delivering projects; governing the portfolio schedule, establishing project priorities and resolving resource allocation conflicts to keep the projects moving. They’re directing and leading process improvements.
 
You could ask, “Why should I care about process improvement?” After all, you’re a project manager, you don’t own the work practices of your resources (engineers, subcontractors, welders, etc.). While the project manager doesn’t “own” anything except the project, you do care about schedule risk. You should care about speed (or flow). Speed is a function of the process. That puts you (the PM) in a kind of governance role, overseeing process improvements. You can’t implement the improvements, but you can make sure there’s a process in place to continuously reduce schedule risk.
 
How do you know if the senior managers are engaged? Not by the number of emails you get, that’s for sure.
 
Measure the blocked and critical tasks, the quantity, and the number of days to resolve them. I keep a list of process improvements and watch if the number of items is stable or falling and the rate of the completion of process improvements
 
If blocked and critical tasks are languishing, it means someone is:

• Not watching the impediments to progress
• Conflicts are not being resolved
• Resolution priorities are not assigned correctly (for speed)

Each of these are governance responsibilities.
 
If you don’t have the right behaviors at the top, you’re not going to get them in the middle or the bottom. As the person accountable for on time delivery, you must know, measure, and manage the behavior to get what you want.
 

The post Spot Delivery Problems Early – Part 1: Governance appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

What does it truly mean? Does time equal money in my project?

If I lose time, I waste money? or If I delay, I get the money later?

If it’s the first definition, you are saying, money is like time. If I waste it, it’s gone forever.

If it’s the latter, you are saying that the delay causes a loss or missing opportunity (during the delay), never to be recovered.

Which is it?

As a practical matter, for a manager delivering a project or results, the main issues are waste and opportunity.

Is all time “wasted” truly lost? How do you know?

Managing Time

Most managers break their projects down into individual tasks with individual deadlines. Like this

Straightforward, isn’t it? Make a list of tasks, estimate durations, link them together and you have your sequence and completion dates. Day to day, your job is to keep those tasks completing on time. To deliver on time, meet all your dates. Don’t be late, each task is important, each resource is important.

Opportunity Time

The problem is that not all task sequences are the same. So, you manage the critical path; if you’re sophisticated, you’ll manage the critical chain. Certain sequences will dictate the overall duration of the project. You’ll give higher priority to one sequence over another.

Here’s the thing about time. By declaring one sequence of tasks more important than another, you are choosing some time to be more crucial than others. Losing time on a non-critical sequence is less important than on the critical sequence. Therefore, in some cases, time is not money. In other cases, time lost is a loss of a LOT of money; the value of the entire project!

During the life of a project, the manager makes tradeoffs between time now and time later. Completing the project delivers a certain value; the value of rental income for a building, the value of a new capability, the value of entering a new market, the value of a new feature, etc. Every project worth doing, is worth doing sooner.

When you’re the project manager, to make an educated decision, you must determine the value of a day. What’s a day worth? And, is the task on the critical chain (which is the shortest time to complete the project)? IF your task is on the critical chain your decisions could be very different than if your task decision is off the critical chain.

Time is Expensive?

You could argue that wasting time on the non-critical tasks costs money. Maybe.

Let’s pick a resource. Let’s say your engineer completes 2 tasks this week, but she can’t do more because she’s waiting for some information. The week before, she was much more productive, she completed 4 tasks. Does that mean that the week where 4 tasks were completed your expenses were lower? Your expenses change only when her pay changes. Only if she was paid less the week 2 tasks were completed. Time equals money only if the expense varies in direct proportion to the work delivered.

For most of us and for most resources, time lost does not equal money lost. People are not paid to produce work; they are paid to show up. The view of the enterprise is that expenses are a function of the number of people on the payroll, not the amount of work that is done. Payroll costs are fixed costs, not variable. Expenses are related to hiring decisions, not production. We can never say time = money when it relates to work, because expenses don’t vary with production. Time = money when look at how many people are on hire per day, week, month, etc.

So, time equals money, sometimes. Not all time is equal. Not all time is costly. Some time is worth a great deal. The cost of time is not the same as the value of time.

Most lost time is simply lost, because most resources are not on the critical chain. And that’s ok. Some lost time affects the critical chain and it’s not ok. What matters is the effect of lost time on the completion of the project, not the completion of an individual task.

The skilled manager must know the difference.

The post Is Time Equal to Money? Part 1 appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Projects, by their nature, are uncertain, but not all uncertainty can be treated the same way. Knowing the where your project’s uncertainty lies will help you pick the right approach to managing your project and delivering the best outcome for your team, your customer and the project owner.

Many projects are time bound, with specific dates that must be met. There are known parameters to the project outcome, but how you’re going to execute are uncertain. If you your project is software or product development, which is iterative, most uncertainty lies in the deliverables; you’re not sure exactly what the deliverable will look like. In essence, you don’t’ know what you don’t know until you develop a prototype; you’re learning as you go. In these types of projects, there is little uncertainty in the process, but a lot of uncertainty in the outcome. This is different than say, construction, where the deliverable is quite well defined. What is most uncertain is the events (like weather or errors) that lead to the deliverable. The process has the most uncertainty, the outcome has little.

Two Approaches to Managing

Scrum and Agile methods that focus on iterations to reduce the learning cycles and reduce the uncertainty. The problem with these projects is when there is a date attached, it’s difficult to effectively manage schedule risk without significant time buffers.

If the uncertainty is in the process, what most project managers do to reduce it is create more detailed plans or (attempting to) closely managing the details in the plan. These projects have many moving parts and lots of detail to manage – along with the normal uncertainty they cannot manage, like the weather and mistakes. So – with all this comes complexity.  That complexity is difficult to manage. Project managers lose control of their schedules. Project owners lose visibility into schedule risk. Project run late, firefighting ensues. It’s difficult and messy. Deadlines are missed. Costs go up. Customers are unhappy. Business is lost. Profits suffer.

Detailed Planning is Not the Cure-All

So, the solution is not in the direction of more detailed planning, but in the direction of improving management effectiveness. This is what ViewPoint and VISUM does. Stripping the project plan to its essence. Doing simple things that leverage what we know about process behavior (little’s law, priority control, etc.). Making the process visual to communicate the critical items quickly. Providing feedback on the project AND the delivery process to allow the team to act early on risk and improve their delivery effectiveness.

Taming complexity.

With ViewPoint, the team always knows the most critical items to work on. They are focused on those items. There is less chaos in the project, so less stopping and starting. People can focus on the work, not on the next meeting. Tasks get done quicker. Project durations are reduced. Costs go down. On time delivery goes up. More projects are delivered. Revenue goes up. Profits go up. Project owners have visibility into the schedule risk so they can intervene when they must. Customers are happy. Project Managers are happy. The CEO is happy.

The post Where is Your Project’s Uncertainty? appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Stop Losing Time

One of the biggest challenges in project that is behind schedule is stop falling further behind. So the first priority is “stop the bleeding”. Preventing things from getting worse has little to do with the plan, no one’s using it anyway. Rather than re-baselining the plan, focus on the process of execution first. Change what people are doing. This is where you’re losing time, so let’s focus on the things that will make the biggest difference in the least amount of time.

• Get your team looking and working forward to get out in front of any problems
• One team, one goal to speed decision making
• Control task priorities to reduce multitasking and boost productivity
• Go faster by systematically leveraging the bottleneck of the project
• Set your execution tempo and quickly respond to problems

Once you have accomplished these things, you can turn your attention to regaining time.

Looking Forward; Visualize Your Project

A visual representation of the project helps your team: they can see where they are, where they’re going, and the major obstacles to moving ahead. Making your project or portfolio process visual prevents information overload, exposing previously hidden process problems. This is not a substitute for your project plan; the basics of a plan or process is required to build to your board. The visualization is a summary of your plan, to be managed by the team.

A visual project board (VPB) provides tangible feedback that everyone can see and understand. If there’s a bottleneck or a gap, team members don’t waste time finding the focus areas, they’re obvious.  They problems are visible, no longer hidden. It solves the “living in the past” problem because the VPB points the way towards completion. It helps get the team out of the weeds and into sorting out only the biggest problems that block progress.

Present your project visually – so your team can quickly communicate and grasp the project status. It eliminates the debate about where things really are, so you can move into action. It sets the stage for the next thing you must accomplish: active collaboration.

Check out this video and this video to learn more about visualizing your projects

Build the Measurements that Reinforce the Behavior You Want

When your project is in trouble, you typically have only a few concrete measures of success.  Delivery date – you’re late! Budget – it’s out of control! Scope – it doesn’t work! These outcome-based metrics are not very helpful in telling you what’s wrong. After all, if you know what to do, it would have been done already!

Going back to the early warning signs. These are the problems; you must find solutions. How can you know if these behaviors are occurring? If these behaviors are happening, your project will continue to lose time. To refresh your memory, the early warning signs are:

• Living in the past
• Conflicting Goals
• Shifting Priorities
• Wandering Bottlenecks
• Slow response to problems

Turning your troubled project around begins with deciding what you want to see, every day. To stop losing time, you much change the team’s behaviors to the opposite:

• Focus on the future – proactive management
• Alignment with the project goal
• Stable priorities – less multitasking
• Focus on the project bottleneck
• Quick response to problems

Focusing on the Future – Managing Proactively and Promptly

The project team that spends all its time on status updates and fighting the fire of the moment has little time or ability to manage what’s coming. To manage what’s coming, the team must be able to see what’s coming. That’s why visualizing your project is important. Once the project is visualized and broken down to its deliverables, you can measure your team’s future focus.

To know if your team is focusing on the future, you must identify on what they should be focusing. Focusing on the future could mean they look forward to the weekend. I want my project team to focus on risk. What could go wrong? What could create a delay? What is not known?

Once they’re identified, are they being mitigated? Resolved? When your team is focused on the future, risks are systematically identified and resolved before they affect progress.

Focusing on the future has three elements:

• Identification of risks
• Mitigation or resolution of those risks
• Before they affect the project

To measure the behavior, you can simply count risks and how many of those risks never become obstacles. In other words, they do not delay the project, (within limits, because risk mitigation is not free) increase costs, or sacrifice project deliverables.

When we visualize the project, we use a red dot on cards to identify tasks that are stopped and yellow dots that are risks.

Your measurement of this behavior is the number of yellow dots per week versus the number of red dots. If people are systematically identifying risks, yellow dots will be rising or will be stable and red dots will be declining or stable. Managing your project team’s ability to focus on the future is as simple as that.

To measure promptness, we measure the duration of a red dot. What we want is quick response to any problems that stop project progress.

Reinforcing the future oriented behavior will transform the dynamic of your team. Rather than excuses, they’ll bring solutions. Rather than surprises, you’ll find alternatives. Fewer obstacles, faster progress. You’ll stop losing time because your team is looking ahead. They’re solving problems. Systematically. That’s what you want!

The visual project management solution I’ve invented, VISUM, has the metrics already built in.  Have a look at VISUM here

Next up: More Measurements to Drive Good Behavior

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1. They Avoid Multi-tasking

Even though many people think multitasking is good, research shows just the opposite. It 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.

In another way, multi-tasking adds work to your project because of task switching. For any task, there is a certain amount of time to setup – to begin doing the real work. For example, to re-start a task, I have to review the work I’ve done, determine where I left off, and then decide what to do next. The more complex the task, the longer this set up time takes.

The more complex a task, the longer the set up time is, causing even more delays. The more switching I do, the more additional work I must do, and the longer every project takes.

The successful project manager guards himself and his team from multitasking.

2. They Communicate Visually

At the ground level of the project, communicating information such as status, obstacles, priorities, and risk are a constant and never-ending challenge.

At the governance levels, program and portfolio owners are often faced with situations where they have either too little or too much information. The quality and timing of the information provided can be subjective, and is usually dependent on the person delivering it. So, if better execution is a goal, and effective communication is the top challenge in execution, it follows that improving communication will lead to improved execution and better business results.

By providing a visual representation of the work, the team develops a shared understanding of where they are and what needs to be done. This improves communication, because they share the same objective viewpoint. People spend less time reporting information like status, obstacles, priorities, and risk and more time on action.

Good project managers give the entire team a view of the playing field so they can act.

3. They Collaborate Intentionally

We know that in under-performing projects, issues are identified very late, and important communication is delayed. The right problem solvers are brought in too late to prevent the problems, and additional work—putting out fires—is then added to the workflow. Capacity runs short, the project is delayed, and costs go up.

Focus on face-to-face accountability – emphasizing what will be done, rather than what has been done.

Create a few simple rules to focus your team on what is to be done, not what has been done. History debates are for analysis, not collaborative execution. Establish guidelines and structure to bring the right people and good communication to the forefront to create action.

4. They Build a One Team, One Goal Approach

Most project teams consist of multiple disciplines from a variety of sources. Each of these team members are placed on the team to accomplish the project’s objective, yet, they bring with them the objective for their functional disciplines as well. Delivering the project is important, but not their main goal. In which case, we have people on the team whose goals do not match.

When functional goals are aligned, each member of the team is free to act in the best interest of the project, without being hindered by conflicting goals from other areas. This eliminates a major source of internal conflict, and speeds decision-making and action.

The savvy project manager pays attention to conflicting objectives among the team members and resolves conflicts between them.

5. They Control the Work in Progress

It seems like common sense: start sooner, you’ll finish sooner. The problem is that everyone starts sooner! Increasing volumes of work in progress increases confusion and conflict—and decreases real productivity. Having a lot of work does accomplish the objective of keeping people busy. However, while everyone is busy, the true picture of the overall project is obscured until deadlines approach, when the failure to complete the right tasks becomes all too visible.

To control work in process, managers establish and enforce pre-release criteria to match work releases with the rate of work completion and ensure no work is started that cannot be finished.

Keep the volume of work under control. Don’t overload the team with too much. Don’t start on projects just for the sake of starting. Successful project managers are focused on finishing.

Successful project managers don’t try to do everything, they focus on the few critical elements that make the difference between doing the work and delivering the work.

Learn more about what is working and what isn’t working in delivering projects. Read The State of Project Management Practice Research

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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.

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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.

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