Rather than get bogged down in theory, it's a fast-paced, action the outcomes for the week and to help people avoid getting overloaded Stakeholder management is one of the secret keys to effective project management.
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I know I have sometimes found myself getting a bit cynical in the face of upbeat cheerleading from folks that one typically finds in sales functions and from other visionary evangelists. But as I think about, I do owe those kinds of folks some thanks for reminding us to appreciate the WOW that we are accomplishing. That means it's the restart of the professional association rubber chicken dinner season. There's a few more left on my calendar this year -- presentations that were committed prior to re-joining what I've come to refer to as the world of regular paychecks and group medical insurance.
Root Cause Analysis for Complex Systems , and got the biggest round of applause I've ever gotten at such a talk. Unfortunately, the applause was at the beginning, not the end of my presentation In my introduction, I referred to my recent change of employment situation and mentioned that one side effect was that I didn't have to worry about sneaking a sales pitch into or under the content of the presentation.
That simple comment " brought down the house. That said, it was one of my better, most comfortable performances, without the stress of feeling I needed to impress someone for possible near term business. At the border of portfolio management and project management lies pipeline management. Once the portfolio management or sales acceptance process determines the relative ordering of projects, the process for synchronizing project launches to constraint capacity is a simple matter of staggering them at the point of use of the constraint.
If project launches are staggered in this manner, then the constraining resource will not be overloaded. And if the constraining resource is not overloaded, then the other non-constraining resources will also, by definition, not be overloaded, thereby reducing pressures to multi-task and simplifying the question of priorities when the occasional need to choose which task to work comes up. By definition, other resources are non-constraints and have more capacity than would be technically needed to support the possible throughput of the system.
But to start cutting and slashing this extra capacity indiscriminately would be a mistake. At some point, that would merely shift the constraint from where it is to another, potentially unpredictable part of the system at the same or lower level of capacity, or worse, set up a situation with hard-to-manage interactive constraints. Instead, the means of managing the constraint for growth of throughput starts with stabilizing the system so that the extra capacity upstream of the constraint assures that the constraint is not starved for work.
Project launches that are synchronized with the ability of the constraint to deal with them will, if sufficient protective capacity is available up stream, flow smoothly to the closely managed possible bottleneck. Similarly, once through the identified constraint, no downstream resource should be so tight that it delays the conversion of constraint output to a complete accrual of project benefit. Again that implies a necessary level of protective capacity downstream as well. Once stabilized and ridden of the effects of overload and multi-tasking, the true capacity of the system and of its components is far more easily identified.
At this point, the organization can take rational steps to grow its capacity and capabilities by systematic constraint management.
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Implications for project portfolio management. Once the constraint of the system is understood, it will have implications beyond just project delivery performance. It will also provide useful input to the project portfolio process. If the organization is limited to taking on projects at the rate that they can pass through the bottleneck, then those projects that have a higher relative benefit value per time required of the bottleneck will be more valuable to the organization than those that require more bottleneck time, all else being equal.
One project may seem to have small face value, but if barely involving the constraint, it will be able to deliver that value while barely displacing some other project and its benefit. On the other hand, if a project that looks very valuable when complete, but requires so much constraint time that many other projects are denied or delayed, it becomes a serious strategic decision to move forward with it. If, by the nature of a bottleneck or constraint, taking on one project forces us to forego or delay another, then this metric of benefit per constraint usage becomes an important factor in the decision to launch.
Rands Management Glossary -- Interview: The day you wear a tie. Interviews are a pitch where you, the hopeful candidate, pitch yourself to a group of folks who have thirty minutes to figure out if they want to spend five years listening to your dumb jokes. An essential unscheduled product milestone where the product realizes they are way behind and choose to kick it into high gear. More at the link. Some hysterical, most amusing, all realistic and useful. More about it from the lexicographer here.
Forgetting about inflation, that price tag can almost get you 2 of these today. And by the way, if you're a Mac user with a. The first of these requirements is directly related to understanding and managing the organization through its constraints.
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Unless artificially forced otherwise, or unless mismanaged to the point of non-recognition by overload, systems put together for a purpose typically have one or at most very few constraints limiting their ability to deliver that purpose. The capacity of the system is the capacity of this constraining bottleneck. Rather than trying to tightly balance the load on all resources and killing throughput in the process , a rational approach to managing such a system is to identify or design in a clearly understood constraint and manage that one piece of the system very closely.
If you read me, Hal, and Clarke, I encourage you to add Tony to your regular perusal. His first weekend of posts includes the following Both sides of this conflict are correct. An iterative process is needed. But we also need project plans and well-designed project models.
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We simply must recognize that we cannot plan an entire, large development effort to the same level of detail. Instead, we design a strategy for the overall development effort, and we construct plans and detailed models only for the few steps immediately before us. Therefore, little has changed really, other than the scope of our project plans and the corresponding models. Instead of trying to define the mother of all project plans, we define many smaller project plans, in rapid succession. In addition, in such a situation, projects are usually launched with an eye to making sure that no one is starved for work.
As a result, there are usually plenty of choices of things for everyone to work on. What happens in this situation is that, as a result of trying to make sure that everyone is always fully utilized a seemingly efficient means of controlling costs , the time it takes to convert a task input into an output that is usable by the next task is expanded by the time it sits while another project gets the attention.
Throughput associated with these projects is lost as their completions are delayed beyond when they could have been achieved. Resource efficiency is not necessarily organizational effectiveness. Throughput of completed projects and their benefit -- paid invoices, improved processes, or new products that will ring new cash registers -- associated with those completions is threatened, lost, or delayed. In every case, they achieved the transformation by setting up or acquiring new disruptive business units and selling off or shutting down ones that had reached the end of their lives.
In no case did they transform the business model of an existing business unit to cause it to catch the disruptive wave. A corporation can evolve, really quite effectively if you know how to do it. It's just the individual business units have a hard time. Linkage via Dave Pollard , who provides good, in-depth commentary on the piece. How individual tasks are defined and delivered are key to the efficient completion of individual projects.
While these single-project and portfolio management concerns are beyond the scope of this chapter, strategies for managing the interaction of various active projects as they vie for the attention of the limited resources are not. Understanding the importance of getting the right things done at the task level, and behaving accordingly are significant contributors to efficiency as well and are the basis for multi-project resource organizational effectiveness.
Unfortunately, too many organizations overlook this and instead emphasize control of costs to the detriment of what they are trying to accomplish. Maximizing throughput or controlling costs? Another pair of necessities for organizational effectiveness is found in the need to maximize throughput of the system and, at the same time, control costs. Many managers look upon these as conflicting requirements, as pressures to keep expenses down have the potential to threaten the ability to deliver more completed projects quickly and with quality.
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This sense of conflict comes from confusing organizational effectiveness with efficiency, and even worse, with resource utilization. Slack helps with transparency, but even it has limits. As your team grows, there are multiple conversations happening in each channel at the same time. While Slack does a good job of curbing email overload, email conversations are now happening on Slack.
There are threads that go back and forth between multiple stakeholders on the team. However, due to the sheer volume of messaging, they disappear deep within the channel. The team forgets these tasks and has to set aside precious time everyday to retrace what important actions have to be completed. Because these tasks get buried within Slack, a manager typically sets up a separate meeting to discuss and recreate those conversations that were happening in Slack. Your team may spend unnecessary time figuring out who needs to be doing what when all of that info was already buried within Slack.
Even when the team decides to update tools like Trello and Asana, this is rarely done the moment the task first comes up in discussions on Slack. Many managers tell me how much time they waste updating project management tools. Eventually the routine breaks down at some point and the team ends up having tasks scattered across docs and spreadsheets.
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