Reforming Project Management » leadership

Lean Projects Are Defined by Lean Behaviors

Hal — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 02:19:07 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Ifollow numerous blogs, news groups and twitter posts on lean. I've noticed a change in the last few months from talking about lean tools to talking about lean behaviors. It's a refreshing change. Toyota made a shift early this century in the way they spoke about their approach. In essence, they started speaking about the Toyota Way vs. the Toyota Production System. Under the TPS, the two pillars were Just-in-Time production and Jidoka (autonomation). Now they speak about the two pillars of continuous improvement and respect for people. It's a shift from tools to tool users. I don't think that Toyota made a big shift in the way they manage. Rather, they noticed something different about what they do on an everyday basis. It's exactly that noticing that we all should pay attention to for our own operations.

Lean is a mindset. It's not a set of practices. Greg Howell, my colleague and business partner, characterizes lean as a constant focus on learning…learning from everything that happens on an everyday basis. Lean companies are learning faster than their competitors. But what does that mean? How do they do that? Steven Spear, co-author of Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System and author of Chasing the Rabbit, offers an insight on what Toyota and other lean companies are doing.

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Post tags: Last Planner, Lean Project

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Project Appraisals Are Dead…Long Live Project Appraisals

Hal — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:52:08 +0000

Just read the June 15 issue of Business Week. They reviewed Management Rewired. Not surprising, it was a far better review than I did in my last post. Here are two statements BW chose to emphasize:

Feedback, praise, criticism — all useless. Instead, put human psychology to work for you, this book advises.

As contrarian as it sounds, Jacobs says employees should set their own objectives and critique their own performance.

This is a book every project leader should read.Performance reviews and project 'post mortems' are not just uncomfortable…they don't produce the kind of value that is intended. We need frequent team member-led assessments that can lead to in-the-moment changes in behavior. That will lead to better projects and more satisfied project participants. This is a book every project leader should read.

©2009 Hal for Reforming Project Management, . | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Project management

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Project Managers Learning to Be Leaders

Hal — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:00:11 +0000

I get a lot of requests to review new books. I'm sitting on 5 books at this time. I try to read them in the order I receive them. I make exceptions for friends. I'm writing today about a book that I moved to the top of the list and I'm pleased I did. Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn't Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science, by Charles S. Jacobs, is a book about transformational leadership. There a lot of fine books on leadership¹ so why another? Hasn't everything already been written? Not quite.

Jacobs calls on neuroscience (the study of how the brain works) to explore what works and doesn't work with leadership behaviors. His conclusions are both reassuring and surprising. I've read many studies that say for most of us, performance-based incentive plans don't work. It's not just that they are ineffective, incentive compensation — rewards and punishment — often produces the opposite effects. Jacobs explains our brain adjusts our behavior to managers who put themselves in a dominant role. On the surprising side, Jacobs says that traditional performance appraisals including the 360° reviews don't work. So what does work?(...)
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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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Project Performance Reviews Meets Microblogging

Hal — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:59:46 +0000

Project performance reviews are dead; long live performance reviews. A standard practice on projects is to conduct a lessons learned (post mortem) at the end of a project. In my opinion it doesn't produce much value. The current project is over so can't benefit from what is said. The project team is often broken up sending people to different projects. Instead, do project assessments all the time. On lean projects people have many practices for assessing learning and performance. The practices range from simple plus|delta reviews at the end of a meeting, to formal retrospectives at the end of a milestone or whenever a breakdown occurs. Now there's a new practice to add to the toolkit. In our ever-connected world, we can now get concise and timely assessments from our colleagues in just a few keystrokes — 140 to be exact.

Do project assessments all the time.

Business Week published a story by Jena McGregor, Job Review in 140 Keystrokes. BW reports that a company has taken a cue from Twitter to design a "quick-and-dirty 360 degree review" process. The service is called Rypple. Project teams can use the service at the end of a meeting, presentation, client review, client prep session, design collaboration, etc. to quickly get your colleagues' views. Rypple sends your request or question to the group. The 140-character responses are presented anonymously to the person sending out the question. It takes just a few minutes to complete. It looks particularly promising for people who work in geographically dispersed teams.

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Leave Behind Your Resignation

Hal — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 02:28:13 +0000

Every now and then along comes a surprise, something you wouldn't say, but now that someone has said it, makes all the sense in the world. The Think Big Manifesto is one of those surprises. It's a small book. Quick read. While it's a timely message for today's economic and political circumstances, there's a timelessness, too. Michael Port invites us, challenges us, engages us to join with him to think big in one provocative idea after another.

I see an authenticity in the writing that is refreshing. From the very beginning of the manifesto Michael confronts his own small thinking; he continues with that throughout the text. His boldest move against his small thinking may be his numbering of the principles in the big thinking code: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34, a Fibonacci sequence. Why would he do that? It's weird. Bold, but weird. (There's my small thinking.) Items 1 and 1 remind me of "my brother Darryl and my other brother Darryl." How will we remember the principles? But Michael pulls it off.

I'm told that good reading doesn't involve subvocalization…sounding out the words as you read. But I challenge you to avoid it. Reading the manifesto is like being in a conversation with Michael. So don't resist, prepare yourself to be called to action, to leave behind your resignation…to join the revolution.

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Ten New Project Management Bloggers at Lean Project Consulting

Hal — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:04:14 +0000

Pardon me for tooting my team's horn. I'm quite proud of my colleagues' efforts at sharing their views and wisdom at delivering design and construction projects on a lean basis. The group is blogging at Coaches Corner. Each has their own blog. Their writing somewhat overlaps, but they each have a specialty.

Please visit Coaches Corner and leave a comment.

Here are 5 of the latest subjects and quotes:

Personal Pull, by Matt Horvat: "I've found a new way to work that is really effective for me…To get started, I worked really hard to get caught up, and now only accept work that fits within my schedule. If I can't do it I'll negotiate with whoever is requesting the work. What I find is that I have much more energy this way. I am pulling work into my life rather than having it pushed on me."

Not-So-Dumb Project Management Questions, Time to Vote

Hal — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 05:18:19 +0000

Time to help me select the top 42 not-so-dumb project management questions. I created a Squidoo lens that has a great vote up, vote down tool that will let the readers arrange the list in their order. You don't need to be a Squidoo member to vote. You can even add to the list. So, go to Not-So-Dumb Project Management Questions to vote.

I'm not planning to keep it up very long, so get over there now! …please

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Vroom and the “Capability Principle”: from sharing the project vision to successfully delivering projects

Claude Emond — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:52:55 +0000

I still meet many project managers who just state that sharing a project vision (if ever there is one) is a waste of time and that the project team should just concentrate on what they are asked (told ?) to do. This always reminds me of my first project management courses, more than 30 years ago (dinosaurs were still alive), when I was told that: "The more information people have about a project, the more veto power we are giving them…so, it is important to keep information sharing to the strict minimum, using as a strict yardstick of information distribution direct-task-oriented need-to-know information."

I am appalled to see that this primitive belief still endures today, since it shows so little understanding of how human minds and hearts really work. I am also appalled that, each time I ask about Vroom's Expectancy Theory of Motivation (dating back from the early 1960s) and it's significance to project management audiences (including many PMPs), I find out that it is still mostly unheard of or, when it is known of, it rings no bell about the relationship between sharing a project vision and mobilizing project teams to ensure project success. This is very unfortunate since Vroom's simple theory:

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Have You Enjoyed Yourself this Week?

Alan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:28:03 +0000

Hi. I’m Alan Mossman, a consultant based in the UK. Hal has invited me to contribute occasional posts to RPM in the areas of design, safety and collaboration.

One of my profs at Uni, Stafford Beer, asserted "A system is what a system does". So why would anyone create a system that in Hal’s words “turns strangers into enemies”.
Will Lichtig addressed this issue in an article for the Fall 07 American Institute of Architects Practice Management Digest. In Projects as Patients, Will suggests a scoring system for project health — should we call it the Lichtig Score? Four of the categories – Collaborative Planning, Reliable Promising, Unaccounted-for Constraints, Safety – have clear criteria.

The questions for the equally important fifth category, Mood, are not so straight-forward to answer:

To what extent is the team positive?
To what extent is honesty and trust evident?
To what extent is the team learning and improving?
Is morale improving, steady or declining?
To what extent are team members being open and honest with each other?
Are there barriers between trades and professions and if so How high are the silo walls?
How long or short are tempers?
To what extent are team members collaborating?

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The Proximity Principle and Project Success: Revisiting Project e-Tip 016

Claude Emond — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:43:20 +0000

In my first guest-blogger entry, I mentioned the importance of managing perceptions. I wrote that not doing so was the main cause of why only one project out of three was considered successful by major stakeholders, according to the Standish Group's Chaos Report¹. I concluded that "not managing perceptions" could be considered the 10th waste of ill-managed projects.

It is easy to say that we have to manage perceptions. But where and how should we start doing that? The Chaos Report gives us pretty good leads on that. The report identifies the involvement of end-users as the No.1 in its Top Ten List of project key success factors. I talked about that also when Hal gave me the opportunity to contribute a project e-tip back in 2003 (e-tip 016: Keep the Customer/End-User Involved). After all these years, this e-tip is still relevant and I propose to rename it The Proximity Principle and to revisit it as it pertains to fighting the 10th waste.

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Ease into (Lean Project) Cold Water — Not!

Hal — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:20:40 +0000

Our inclination is to ease into new situations. We take baby steps thinking that it is the safe way to engage in something new. Two of my sons just went sky diving. There's no reasonable way to ease out of the plane…particularly when you are jumping tandem. There's no reasonable way to ease into cold water. How do I know? I've tried it. I suspect many of you have tried it too!

"…incremental change promotes a parochial outlook and attitude"

Lean practices are as shocking as cold water. There's no sense easing into lean. It only extends the pain. We know that lean thinking is superior to conventional wisdom. What most people don't know is how to engage in the new lean practices. Jump in!(...)
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