Driving Project Reliability
December 18th, 2002 by HalMy friend Joe (Learning About Lean) asked me to offer more observations and assessments of my jobsite visit last week. I haven't discussed this with the project team, so out of courtesy I will offer some general comments based on my visits with them and with a number of projects in the last month.
Greg Howell and I regularly visit well-run projects. It seems that only people who are doing relatively well are sincere about their intentions to improve. There's a book that expresses that sentiment, Better Makes Us Best. The team I visited had that attitude. The members ask questions, invite assessments, and reach out to each other for help. I can't stress the importance of this enough. I'll take a rookie team who asks for help over a know-it-all experienced team any day.
Well-organized jobsites and high project reliability go together. The site I visited was clean and organized. While I didn't inquire how long particular material had been on site, there wasn't much lying around. This is consistent with lean principles, specifically eight wastes. Now when I see a well-organized site I expect to see a project that is on time and on budget.
Planning is an everyday practice. I was particularly struck by the negotiating underway last week. I am used to seeing people trying to reschedule today's activities based on what didn't get done or went wrong yesterday. The negotiating that was going on had to do with work to be performed in the coming weeks. There are two significant points to that:
- The team saw the specifics of the up-coming look-ahead plan as just one approach to meeting the milestones as promised to the customer;
- Planning is an on-going collaborative process that always includes those people executing the plan.
The team in Colorado and every other team taking a lean approach see planning and execution as tightly coupled or extensions of each other. This is unlike the description offered by PMI and in general practice where planning, execution, and control are seen as separate functions performed by different people.
One last observation…I noticed a wonderful mood among the project team. Some people might say, "Of course! The project is on schedule and on budget." Sure, that helps. Or, is their mood contributing to the good results? Time and again I see the project leaders of high performing teams taking the time to shape the mood of the team. The leaders do this in the stories they tell. One way of doing this is with a project k-log. I wrote about this October 8th Project Klogs: Changing Paradigms. An even better way is by being with the project team everyday. Not only are you in a position to tell the story, you are part of it.
Related Posts
- Toyota’s Innovation Factory There's a new kid on the block and from his early writing, I'll be paying close attention. Creativity Driving Innovat...
- Sharing PPC Results in Trust-Worthiness Unreliable or unexpected behavior of trade contractors in allocating resources is a major source of variation in const...
- NSC’s Safety Congress & Expo Tuesday at NSC's Safety Congress & Expo: "OSHA, NIOSH Unveil Priorities for 2005. BLR reported that OSHA is making Vol...
- Follow the Lean (Project) IT Leader Toyota has recently adopted proprietary software for their operations, What’s Driving Toyota? as reported by Baseline....
- What’s Driving Toyota? While Toyota is in 3rd place in the US behind Ford and GM, it ranks 2nd in sales worldwide and 1st when it comes to pr...
