Reforming Project Management » design

Friction-Free Collaboration

Hal — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:34:03 +0000

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I've just arrived at the PMI Global Congress 2009 in Orlando, FL. Tomorrow AM a number of us who are members of the PMI New Media Council will be speaking in a panel on social media and its impacts on the discipline of project management. Among other things, I'll be talking about my company's experience using Yammer. Our experience has been good. More on that later.

It's great seeing a smiling colleague's faceOur company works with architects, engineers and construction firms along with the clients of those firms. We're a small consultancy…just 12 people all working out of their homes in all 4 US continental timezones or at our clients' work sites. We can get isolated from one another. Many of us have become way too self-reliant going so far that some people reinvent materials because it appears easier than collaborating with peers. While we take great measures to make the company's materials widely available using Windows Live Sync, still we weren't collaborating like we wanted to.

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Time to Re-Th!nk Improvement

Hal — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:10:50 +0000

So much of our attention in the lean community is on continuous improvement. Normally that is interpreted as "process improvement". In the project world processes are often incidental to the work we are doing to fulfill the promise of the project. In other words, the value stream goes through a series of tasks like writing software code, documenting a feature, refactoring, etc., none of which follow a repeatable step-by-step process. Architecture and construction projects are similar. The process stuff is supporting the value stream. When we make so-called improvements to process we are dealing with "the how" some outcome is accomplished. Rarely are improvements focused on "the what" of the outcome. Ric Merrifield tells us to shift from the how to the what to get innovation and to really cut costs.

Shift from "the how" to "the what" to boost innovation and to really cut costs.Ric's book, RETHINK: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation, does a good job of getting our attention off the how and onto the what. He offers story after story of companies that stay clear about what makes them distinctive to their customers. While the process for delivering on results is always important, getting the outcome right makes or breaks our projects. My colleagues and clients have heard me say over and over Don't improve on something that we shouldn't be doing in the first place. Ric says it more forcefully,

Never has there been a more important time to continually improve your company's efficiency and productivity. (F)or that to happen, they are going to have to avoid the "how" trap, rethink and focus on their "whats," and become a collection of plug-and-play operations.

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Lean Project Implementation Is Not Adoption

Hal — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:18:11 +0000

I was speaking today with the COO of a large construction firm that has been on a journey to deliver their projects on a lean basis for the last 8 years. We were speaking about the usual comments senior people make about lean. He said, "Don't paper the projects; you need to change your practices to deliver a lean project." In other words, going through the motions won't make the project lean. But what will make it lean?

You need to change your practices to deliver a lean project.Doing a project lean is not an implementation issue. Rather, it is about adopting a different set of behaviors. Behaviors are an individual issue. Each person has to decide that they will approach their work differently. This is the bad news. It's also the good news. Why? There's really nothing to implement. My colleagues (and clients) might disagree. So be it. The fundamental issue is for people to approach their work with a new attitude and a new commitment.

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Project Blogs Never Been Easier nor More Useful

Hal — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:06:14 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

About seven years ago I speculated on this weblog a use for blogging on projects. It was a naive post at the time. I didn't have real conviction about it. I never encouraged my clients to have a try. Well, times have changed, or maybe I have changed. Project collaboration and up-to-date communication is valued more than ever. The technology just got so simple that there's no work to do to create and maintain a project blog.

Send an email and the project update is made

Posterous is a blogging and social media platform that works from your email account. You can use it from your desktop or your mobile phone. Just send a message to post@posterous.com and the rest is magic! The subject of your email becomes the title of the post. Anything you attach — photos, Powerpoint, recordings, documents — are handled by Posterous and presented elegantly on your blog. You can set up your blog so every member of your team can post. That would be very useful for keeping everyone up to date on progress, particularly when geographically dispersed. Just send an email and the project update is made!

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Big Day for Project Managers Designers

Hal — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:58:49 +0000

What do The Sopranos, In-N-Out Burger and Jim Collins have in common? They are featured in Matthew May's book In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing which ships today. This is a little book about a big topic, how elegant design comes to be. Matt takes his readers through a series of stories that reveal the elements of elegant design. Why might that be useful for project managers? My first answer is we are all designers.

Start rethinking your role, whatever it is, as a designer.

Projects come to be when we make a big promise to someone. That big promise requires us to assemble a temporary organization to deliver on the promise. How we do that is completely up to us and our team. We design the temporary organization and we design the approach or path that we will take. For the most part, we don't think of our roles as designers of projects. Instead, I hear project managers speak of our role as conducting a project putting our attention on getting things done rather than creating a space or setting for doing. Does this matter? You bet. One way we characterize great projects is by the freedom project participants have to explore, experiment and express themselves. Designing for that is our challenge.(...)
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Do Checklists Make Architecture and Design Projects Better?

Hal — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:17:17 +0000

Image by Dan O'Leary via Flickr

Web 2.0 is synonymous with the software solutions 37signals creates. You know the names, Backpack, Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, Ta-da List and Whiteboard. These are the same people behind Ruby on Rails. How do they do such great work?

They call it Getting Real. It's an approach — a philosophy really — that guides how they do what they do to build software solutions. Oh, you don't do that! There's a lot to learn for everyone who does design and development projects.

"Avoid (Getting Real) at your peril."

That includes building architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, new product development team, etc. Seth Godin had this to say about the book, "Avoid it at your peril."(...)
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What Do Twitter and Architecture Have in Common?

Hal — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:59:46 +0000

Agile software development is known by its different variants, most notably Scrum, Extreme Programming and Function Driven Development. I was reading up on Twitter for some posts I'm planning for Web 2.0 project management when I came across this quote from a recent Twitter Blog post:

Pair programming has helped us achieve more than just higher quality code and better code readability. This methodology is also about more intense and focused work sessions, automatic code reviews, and better tests. Pair programming also develops better personal relationships and improved communication which has meant a lot.

It's refreshing to hear this. I know it works. I've seen it work. I just don't see many people writing about it.

Collaborate with people closest to the "real work."

I've been encouraging architects and engineers to adopt pair design in the building projects. We've had some small experiments between engineers and trade detailers to create construction details. The efforts were successful, but the common sense is that two at one keyboard is unproductive, or worse. They just might talk about March Madness rather than design some aspect of the mechanical system.

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Learning from The Elegant Solution

Hal — Wed, 21 May 2008 04:45:41 +0000

Two years ago I read Matthew May's book The Elegant Solution. It's a description of how to create an organization that day-after-day is recognized by the innovation that it creates.

The book is based on the time Matthew spent with the University of Toyota. I've reread the book to prepare for a Study Action Team™¹ that I am leading for a hospital that is being designed and constructed. Toyota is best known as the world's best manufacturer. But even more important to their long-term success, Toyota knows how to do projects.

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AIA “Hot Topic”: Target Value Design

Hal — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 04:34:29 +0000

Back in the fall 2007, the AIA Practice Management Digest asked Greg Howell, Executive Director of the Lean Construction Institute, to convene a panel of design and construction lean thinkers to write on lean design (for construction). I was one of the invited essayists. I wrote a paper with Greg and John Barberio. Our topic was Target-Value Design.

We proposed that Target-Value Design (TVD) turns the current design practice upside-down.

Rather than estimate based on a detailed design, design based on a detailed estimate.
Rather than evaluate the constructibility of a design, design for what is constructible.
Rather than design alone and then come together for group reviews and decisions, work together to define the issues and produce decisions then design to those decisions.
Rather than narrow choices to proceed with design, carry solution sets far into the design process.
Rather than work alone in separate rooms, work in pairs or a larger group face-to-face.

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Be Lean…Build Lean

Hal — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:07:22 +0000

As 2007 came to a close, lean design and construction got some well-deserved press. The manufacturing community shares their successes and learning about lean through Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) and their "Target Magazine". Most lean manufacturers operate in buildings that were neither designed or built lean. That can change. Karen Wilhelm, writing for Target, spent quite some time investigating the lean construction movement. She shares what she learned in a cover story, Collaboration Makes Construction Lean.

"The culture of heroes works against the smooth flow of work."

I won't spoil the article for you by summarizing it. Not only does Karen write well, she shares a vision of what we can be doing in the built environment. I will offer one teaser…(...)
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“Fail Fast, Fail Cheap” Sounds Like Scrum

Hal — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 03:52:26 +0000

There is such an urge to get our projects right. Not approximately right. Right, as "Do it right the first time." Projects are not like that, especially design projects. Norman Bodek has been speaking about two principal ways we learn: copying the successful actions of others and making mistakes. If making mistakes is part of learning, then we better be making many of them to produce successful projects. BW SmallBiz agrees: Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, June/July 2007, by Doug Hall.

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Scrum: Inspect and Adapt

Hal — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 02:03:26 +0000

There's nothing like learning-in-action.¹. We just finished our planning session for our development project. I was surprised by how much time we spent defining what it meant to be done. In the LPS world we call that establishing conditions of satisfaction. But we struggle to get team members to stay in that conversation. "Just tell me what you want!" The ScrumMaster wouldn't let us move on 'til he confirmed that the whole team understood what would satisfy the Product Owner.

I'm looking forward to comprehending!

Towards the end of today's session, I noticed that our ScrumMaster frequently said, "We'll inspect and adapt." (He said it before we started the planning. I just hadn't noticed.) "Of course," I thought. The future is uncertain and unknowable. That's just what we do on (LPS) projects. But I also know it's not what is usually done on CPM-style projects. Conventional wisdom (and scheduling software) guides people to put a plan in place and stick to it. The result is project managers often try to get reality to match their plan. Doesn't work. Never did.

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