troubled project Archives - Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel

Spot Project Delivery Problems Early Part 2: The Fundamentals

mark woeppel — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 22:49:31 +0000

In part 1, I wrote about governance. If the owners of the project are not governing the basic behaviors to execute well, your risk of delivery is rising. If you haven’t read it, please do. You’ll understand what I’m talking about here.

Just a short reminder: 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 want, you should measure the behaviors that create them.

The behaviors to deliver on time; or why projects are late.

Someone, perhaps it was Elon Musk, says your car is the most underutilized resource you have. Only 15% of the time. It’s typically the most expensive asset people have, after a house. It’s sitting. Not moving. In your garage. In your parking lot at work. It’s a very expensive convenience.

Like your car, projects are sitting most of the time, too. At least half the time. You could be going faster, but your project is waiting. Considering the value of a project, that waiting is quite expensive. I worked on a project where each day early or late meant over $4mm in revenue per day.

Maybe you don’t have projects that have that sort of impact, but the point is that the earlier a project is completed, the sooner you receive the benefits of that project. Most of the time the project is waiting. Why wait?

You can know – early – if your project is waiting.

But the schedule isn’t going to tell you. Projects that are going to be late are comprised of tasks that are slow to complete. If you measure the rate of task completion, you can get sense of how fast your project is moving. You can measure the duration of tasks, too. If the task duration is increasing, your project is slowing down.

If you are doing projects over and over, you could measure the rate of completions. That would give you a sense of how your process is delivering, but it’s always after the fact. It’s not predictive. You must look at the actions that are needed to increase the rate.

The rate of task completions will give you a sense of how all work is proceeding, so you look at the rate and the accumulation of task completions. If tasks are completing quickly, that means that in general, waiting is minimized and you have good flow.

The two elements give you a different look at completion velocity. One gives you an absolute number, the other gives you a sense of acceleration. If the slope of task completions over time is 45 degrees, you’re holding steady. Less than 45 degrees, you’re slowing. Greater than 45 degrees, you’re speeding up.

You can see that during part of the project things slowed down. A lot! Then things sped up again. Why is that? This will have a big effect on your delivery. The slowdown tells you that your project delivery risk is rising! Managing delivery risk is the PM’s job, isn’t it?

That doesn’t tell the whole story. We know the rate of the system is determined by the rate at the constraint. This graph tells us about all the project tasks. It could be, that the constraint isn’t working very fast, and all the non-constraints are working ahead. When that happens, your project delivery risk could still be risking and you wouldn’t know. So you must look at the throughput (completions) for the system versus the constraint.

In the example above, the constraint (Bottleneck1: Material Processing) didn’t complete anything for four weeks, then started completing more and more. The red line indicates the target throughput for this resource, 2 per week. On the right, the average is a bit less than target. So that means that this portfolio team is completing slightly fewer projects per week than planned. Schedule delivery risk is rising.

What about completions, once the projects pass through the constraint, do they get completed?

A similar wave effect as the constraint operation. Very little at the start, then a lot. We can safely say that that output at the constraint resource is a predictor of the output of the overall system. (The operations geek in me is also wondering about the hockey stick effect. Hmm. Looks like something is broken there.)

Knowing, measuring, and managing the precursor behaviors as measured by task completion velocity is critical to managing the schedule risk. Our teams look at overall completion velocity to see we’re going faster or slower and we look at the constraint completions as the predictor of system output.

The ViewPoint visual project management (execution) methodology takes the best practices from PMBOK, Agile, Lean, and the Theory of Constraints to give you a consistent, scalable method for executing projects on time.

Check out the ViewPoint Methodology here at Amazon.com: Visual Project Management

The post Spot Project Delivery Problems Early Part 2: The Fundamentals appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Five Early Warning Signs of a Troubled Project

mark woeppel — Sun, 15 May 2016 18:37:17 +0000

Thousands of surveys around the world show that projects are rarely delivered on time, on budget and in scope. Here are the warning signs and what you can do to turn things around.

You don’t see it coming until it’s too late. Everything was “green” until it wasn’t. All parts of the project were close to being on time. At least until they weren’t.
If you knew earlier, you could have made changes that wouldn’t be as costly and damaging to your customer relationships as the choices you’re making now.

That light at the end of the tunnel? Definitely a train.

So what to do?

Most project managers and executives assume that since the schedule showed the project was on time, it must have been a bad schedule that caused it. If we had planned better, we would have finished on time!

Well, maybe.

Projects are not abstract things, lived out in spreadsheets or software.

There is no such thing as a perfect plan, no such thing as a 100% accurate forecast. After all, who can predict the weather?

Here’s the thing. Uncertainty is What Makes a Project a Project. When we start the projects, we know many things we will encounter on the way to completion, but not every thing. That means surprises are a way of life in the project world. Any plan is made up of educated guesses about what will happen in the future. How accurate could they be?

Experienced project managers develop coping strategies: negotiating for more resources, disguising contingency, stakeholder management, risk management processes, increasing the amount of detail, frequent re-planning, and more. All of these are good to have, but they don’t get at the root of schedule variation; they’re coping strategies for the surprises that plague every project.

No matter how good you are at planning, you will never have a perfect schedule. You can make them better, but they will never be perfect. Improving your planning is not where you’re going to find the biggest opportunity. You be nimble during execution. If you’re not, your great plan will not matter anyway.

Let’s agree that your schedule will not be very good. How do you know if you’re in trouble? How can you quantify your nimbleness? How do you pull out of a bad situation?

The Early Warning Signs of a Project in Trouble

Project planning is a bit like time travel. Who knows what we’ll find there?

So rather than be the best forecaster, build the best time machine, the project delivery process. Your execution behaviors are the best predictors of project success.

While we can find opportunity in every plan (I started my career as a scheduler), look first at what the project team is doing.

How they’re managing the project.
How flexible are they?
Do they respond quickly?
Decisively?
How are they responding to the day to day surprises that are presented to them?

There are behavioral indicators of whether your project will be on time. They can be observed, measured, and improved.

Focus on the future; what needs to be done, not what has been done
One team, one goal; the team members’ functional objectives are subordinated to project objectives
Task priorities are stable; they do not change from day to day so resources are able to work on each project task until completion
We know where the leverage points to accelerate progress; bottlenecks are clearly identified and communicated
All leading to rapid resolution of the unexpected

So let’s look at your team. Are they doing any of the following?

Living in the Past

In many projects, reporting progress is a substitute for moving forward. True, you must understand where you are relative to where you’re going, but reporting completions is not a substitute for managing the future.

If your team is living in the past, they’ll be spending a great deal of time reporting “progress”; percent completed and giving the reasons why things are not done. They’re a little stuck; working to understand where they are in the project. Project meetings are spent sorting out what has been done and negotiating priorities. They’re not looking forward and project progress reflects it.

You won’t get to your destination looking through the rear view mirror.

Check out this video to learn more of this symptom and you can do about it.

Conflicting Goals

Many times, the only person who is actually on the project is the project manager. He then spends his time on enrollment and buy in activities, rather than the core task of moving the project ahead. It happens so frequently, there is a section of the body of knowledge devoted just to stakeholder management.

If any team member has conflicting goals, they will not be fully engaged with work of the project, they may even make decisions that make completing the project more difficult. They don’t respond to questions quickly, don’t come to meetings, are not working with the rest of the team to move the project forward.

In order to win, everyone on the team must have the same goal.

Check out this video to learn more of this symptom and you can do about it.

Shifting Priorities

The project team members are spending their time sorting through the work to determine which tasks should have the highest priority. They’ll respond to the latest communication from a customer or a friend, or a boss. They’ll be switching – changing priorities for the resources (people) doing the work of the project.

When priorities are changing, more work is added to the project, time and productivity are lost, and the project is delayed.

Priority shifting breeds multitasking; the number one killer of productivity.

Check out this video to learn more of this symptom and you can do about it.

Wandering Bottlenecks.

The project never has enough resources to complete the work at hand. Finding more resources is a constant battle. There’s never enough time or budget. It just seems that the right resources are not available when you need them. The team may feel a little like they’re playing project “Whack-A-Mole”.

There is always a constraint that limits the rate at which the project can be completed, but if it’s always moving from week to week or day to day, it indicates a poor grasp of the resource requirements to complete the project.

The bottleneck is where you get leverage to go faster. If you don’t recognize it, you’re just spinning your wheels.

Check out this video to learn more of this symptom and you can do about it

Slow Response to Problems

Many projects are riddled with the “I sent an email, but have not gotten a response.” kinds of problems. Yes, the different time zones are an issue. Yes, we get hundreds of emails a day, but a delayed response to a critical problem slows the entire project down.

A slow response to problems indicates a team that is not engaged. They have a poor understanding of what the important issues are, who owns them, and what is needed to resolve them.

The single largest aspect of project duration is wait time. The more you wait, the longer it takes.

Diagnose Your Project. Will You Be Late?

Take a free project execution maturity assessment and see how you’re doing.

Experienced project managers and executives may still point to the plan as the biggest cause for troubled projects. Or the assumptions behind the plan. They have a point, I have never worked in a recovery project where the plan was acceptable or was even being used to drive the day to day behavior. I’m talking about leverage. In a recovery situation, you must focus on the most critical elements that will get your project back on track as quickly as possible. You can’t fix everything that’s wrong, you have to fix the things that will give you the biggest results as fast as possible. Re-planning your project is an excuse to delay taking the necessary medicine to get things moving. Focus on execution. that’s where your leverage is.

Next up, a project recovery strategy. If you’re in a hurry, you can watch the webinar on this topic here

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