Daily Coordination for Managing Promises
January 27th, 2005 by HalArticle Series - Project Meeting Protocols
By now you might be agreeing with Patrick Lencioni's book title, Death by Meeting! Hold on…the protocols all work together.
We have a process for making ready the requested work so it can be promised. We have a process for making promises day-by-day for performing the work. Now we need a process for finding out what work is in process and what is being completed. We can't wait 'til a weekly meeting. Why? Because your work tomorrow depends on my completion today. Coming into work tomorrow only to find out that my group hasn't finished now creates a mess for you and your workgroup. If you could have found out two days earlier you would have adjusted your workplan.
The daily coordination meeting is a very short meeting. You'll want to conduct the meeting standing up. And if you have to conduct the meeting on the phone, then get everyone to promise to be standing when they are on the call! No kidding. Getting comfortable will only extend the meeting. Also, no coffee, doughnuts, birthday cakes, etc. This is a meeting to fine tune the work we are doing with each other. It doesn't take more than 15 minutes.
The meeting starts by asking people to report complete on the work promised for the day. "I'm done" or "I'm not done" are the only allowed responses. Only complete work releases work for other people. When someone reports "Not done" ask for a new promise. You'll also want to ask what kept the performer from completing as promised. Record the reason provided for future analysis and removal of the cause of the planning (promising) failure. Record the number of promises completed as a percent of promises made for that day. Graph the results and display the graph where you conduct your daily meeting. Record the reasons for plan failure in Pareto chart fashion (vertical bar chart by reason type). (Make a Pareto chart quickly.)
Next you'll want to ask people if they need any help to complete their promised work. Often constraints will arise in the course of doing the work in spite of the effort given to look-ahead planning. This is also a time for people to announce that they will be doing work identified as workable backlog.
What's the best time to have a daily coordination meeting? It depends: either at the beginning or end of the workday. On construction sites the end of the day works well. It gives people the opportunity to do some replanning overnight and to authorize some overtime to complete work before the start of the next day. In other settings — new products development, software, engineering, architecture — the beginning of the days seems to work well. People are often keeping different work hours. The beginning of the day schedule allows them to fine tune their actions for the day.
Are we complete? Not yet. Last up, improving the system performance.
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