Weekly Work Planning
December 19th, 2004 by HalArticle Series - Project Meeting Protocols
The Weekly Work Planning session is the time when performers make promises for the completion of work in front of the other project performers. This public promising is essential to producing reliable workflow. Try a thinking exercise with me to see the advantage of the approach.
Let's say you and I and another four people have working groups of people that we lead on a project together. Each of us manages a team with a different specialty. So we start our weekly work planning conversation by reviewing the promises we are making for completing work day-by-day in the coming week. I start by saying my group will have tasks A and B done on Monday, tasks C on Wed, and tasks D, E, and F on Friday. Independent of me you have planned your group's work. You have your own tasks, but your team needs to coordinate with my group. You might need access to the same physical space or controlled documents. So you ask me, "Hal will your group really be done with task B on Monday?" I say, "Sure will. We're mostly done already." "Great!" you add. "I'll then move up my task G to start on Tuesday and finish on Wednesday."
If we had individually negotiated those workplans with the project manager you would not likely have found out you could get started early in the week. Further, others on the team may now plan their work based on both the promises I made and the revised promises you made.
Performers (last planners) prepare their workplans outside the meeting. Each group submits the WWP to the project manager prior to the meeting so that the plans can be compiled into a single plan organized by workstream.
Start the weekly work planning meeting with a review of the prior week's performance. Go through the PPC (percent of promises/plan complete) for the overall project and the individual workgroups. Add the data to a graph if you haven't done so already. Have a short conversation about what you might expect in the coming week.
Next, review the Pareto data for the reasons for not completing work as promised. Look for patterns in the data from one week to the next. Examine the data by performer group, as well.
Now, have a conversation about the coming week's work by workstream not by performer. You want to give attention to how one group's promises connect to other groups' performance. This is critical to establishing a base for reliability. When one performer sees how their promises impact others, then the reliability of promising will improve. Make any necessary adjustments to individual plans so that work flows smoothly from one performer to another. Add time buffers between performers when you can expect unreliability of completion (either low performer PPC or anticipated variability in the project).
Review the workable backlog that has been planned for the coming week. Give people the opportunity to negotiate workable backlog away; for instance, I might plan to do a task that would put the project out of sequence for you. You should have the opportunity to ask me not to plan that work.
Finish the meeting with a Plus-Delta (+Δ) review.
By now you've got to be thinking, "No project work happens that reliably." That's right. Research conducted by the Lean Construction Institute showed that usual teams working from schedules are about 50% reliable completing what they set out to do sometime in the coming week. That is insufficient for coupling one workgroup's tasks to another's. However, people using these protocols are routinely getting reliability of 85% to the day promised. That is sufficient to couple work among performers and workgroups.
There's still a missing piece. The secret is in reporting complete on the work performed. For that we'll take a look at daily coordination meetings.
Related Posts
- Project Meeting Protocols Meetings, meetings, meetings...we have far too many that don't produce the value for the attendees or the project. Pa...
- Look-Ahead Planning Last week I proposed a set of meeting protocols for conducting projects on a lean basis. These protocols are used wit...
- Conduct Daily Stand-Up Meetings for Projects The daily stand-up meeting is a crucial aspect of keeping projects moving without interruption. I made two postings: ...
- Daily Coordination for Managing Promises By now you might be agreeing with Patrick Lencioni's book title, Death by Meeting! Hold on...the protocols all work t...
- Improving the Planning System Performance The planning system is likely to become more reliable just because you are giving your attention to reliability; it fo...
