Archive for the 'PM practice' Category

My hat's off to an amazing group of organizers and volunteers of the Orange County PMI Chapter. Saturday's PMI in Action event brought out about 150 people on a sunny day. The agenda was packed. The speakers did a great job from Mark Mullaly's keynote "What Makes a Great Project Manager" to David Anderson's back-to-back sessions on Agile, Deming, and the the use of cumulative flow diagrams (CFD) for managing project work. (More on CFD in another post.)

I did my two presentations on Let's Play Catch! and Why Do Projects on a Lean Basis? They were well-received. I've uploaded them for you.

Business Week is stepping out! This week's issue is focused on the role of innovation to the viability of the firm. I'm a 33 year subscriber. There's never been a cover like this one. And it's not all sizzle. There's plenty of steak in the articles. If you're not a subscriber, this issue will change your mind.

The cover story describes five steps (stages) of the innovative firm.

1. Technology and information become commoditized and globalized.
2. With commoditization, core advantages can be shipped abroad.
3. Design strategy begins to replace Six Sigma as a key organizing principle.
4. Creative innovation becomes the key driver of growth.
5. The successful Creative Corporation emerges, with new innovation DNA.

While their interpretation is interesting, the stories and examples are illuminating.

I get my prescriptions from CVS, but the Target Prescription Bottle has me rethinking my choice. The usual prescription bottle is difficult to read. Frankly, I don't read it as carefully as I should. 'Take with a meal', 'Avoid taking with alcohol', and 'Stop taking if a rash develops'. Who can read this stuff? (Ok, if I wasn't middle-aged and nearly blind I might be able to read it.) The Target prescription bottle is exactly the kind of innovation and day-to-day creativity that separates great companies from merely good ones.

BW is one of the finest publications available. The writing is wonderful. Don't miss this issue.

In the last week saying "No" on your projects is getting attention. Thanks to Frank Patrick for pointing us to postings from Jeffrey Phillips, Getting to No, and Ester Derby No Is in the Air. I couldn't help but add my two cents Be Responsible, Say "No". Long time readers know this as one of my soap boxes. In November 2002, I was writing about uncertainty Reduce Uncertainty by Promising Reliably.

Promising is in our control. We can say "yes" or "no". (I know some people think they must say "yes" to keep their job.) When we say "yes" but we mean "no" we add uncertainty to the project. When we say "yes" but fail to allocate sufficient capacity to the task (blocking time in our calendar) we add uncertainty. When we say "yes" but don’t understand what will satisfy our customer we add uncertainty. Do I need to go on?

A few years earlier (1994) Greg Howell and Glenn Ballard, both of the Lean Construction Institute, wrote the paper, Lean Construction Theory: Moving Beyond 'Can-Do'. They claim that we can't improve our project performance without people saying "No".

(C)urrent management approaches are built on and entice dishonesty. We cannot improve performance unless new thinking exposes the contradictions and weaknesses in our underlying mental models and injects certainty and honesty into the management of projects. It is simple in concept and not hard in execution once we take the challenge of no longer accepting "Can Do" when "Won’t Do" is appropriate. Only then will we have the consistent feedback needed for rapid learning.

The idea of saying "No" as being responsible has been around for quite some time. While "simple in concept and not hard in execution", we still get far too many yeses when no is more appropriate. It may be simplistic to suggest fear is in the way of saying no.

Here's one action you can take to get the no you need to get. Make it your routine to invite people to say "No". Only then will Can-Do mean anything. That's right, by inviting people to decline requests you and others make you are creating the situation for honest conversations among your team. It's in that setting of honesty that we can be most successful.

I'm trying something new. I've invited readers to author postings for Reforming Project Management. The first one appeared today. You'll see others soon. Send me an email if you are interested in expressing your views on these pages. I'll ask you about your story ideas. We'll discuss your how often you want to post. Once is fine. More often is better.

As a practicing project manager, I spend a lot of time swimming among reams of data - status reports, time sheets, change requests, vendor contracts, performance reports, issue logs, action items, etc. etc.

How much of this really matters?

I believe that there are few really critical success factors for projects:

1. You must have a clear and definite scope.
2. You must have executive support.
3. You must have a committed team (meaning allocation to the project as well as emotional commitment).

What are the clearest, most economical, and most effective indicators of these factors? Shouldn't these be what you should pay the most attention to in order to manage a project successfully?

I would like your opinions on this. I think a large number of scope changes approved for a project indicate both a poor scope, and poor support from the executives. What is a better indicator of resource commitment? Is it the percent allocated and tracking to the project, or is the number of tasks started and completed each week? How do you track executive support? Attendance at steering committee meetings? Willingness to freeze changes? Turn-around-time on deliverable reviews and acceptance? Willingness to implement risk mitigation steps?

What constitutes the 'thin-slice,' as Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, puts it, that provides the project manager with the rapid cognition of not only the health and well-being of the project, but also feeds the PM's intuition regarding the right next steps for both preventive and corrective actions?

I've been out of circulation for a number of reasons for the last month. But I've not been idle. A few people have suggested I bring my course on becoming more reliable in the project environment to a larger population. It took me awhile, but here it is.

Let's Play Catch!™ is the orientation I bring to my work with others. I've learned that project success depends in large part on the reliability of completion of each and every task. Goldratt taught us about the compound effects of dependence and variability on throughput in the production environment. It turns out those effects are more serious in the project environment. They key is to get reliability in task completion. But how?

Ten years ago I introduced a game for learning to be responsive reliable performers. Four years ago I started teaching securing reliable promises in the project setting. Until last month, I hadn't put the two together. (So, I'm a little slow…) It took one of my coaching friends to prompt me to put them together. And so Let's Play Catch! was born.

I've started by creating a website and a mini-course by email. The course is 10 lessons, each about 2 minutes long. There's no charge for the mini-course. I'll be posting on the website once each week for starters. Eventually, I'll have a course to offer.

In the meantime, have a look, try the mini-course, and refer the site to your project team members who could use a little nudge .

Johanna is doing a great job with the series at Managing Product Development. We've all seen these schedule games. We may even recognize the names. Her posts so far:

• Schedule Game #1: Schedule Chicken
• Schedule Game #2: 90% Done
• Schedule Game #3: Bring Me a Rock
• Schedule Game #4: Hope is Our Most Important Strategy

Have a look. And let's hope she keeps the series going.

Effern, one of my readers, has been writing a weblog titled The Vision Thing on the topics of business, process, and management. Effern interviewed three project management bloggers, Johanna Rothman: Managing Product Development, Clarke Ching: I Think Not, Baby Puppy, and me for a podcast series he calls The Sound of Vision.

With all my travel last week I was just able to connect to listen to the podcast. Effern interviewed us separately then patched together a program. I am quite surprised how well it came out. Each of us spoke for about 20 mins on our perspective of project management. You'll find three complementary approaches. Have a listen — put a voice to the online ramblings — then get over to each of the weblogs.

Mark Mullaly writing in GanttHead suggests that project management becoming a profession may not be what we really want, Brave New World (Part 1). He outlines the additional responsibilities — professional liability — along with a shift in authority that would be required. How many of us think we have the authority we need to do our jobs? How many think that will change? He further introduces the likelihood of regulation. (Sarbanes-Oxley all over again!)

I'm sticking with the status quo. Although, I have joined the PMI and I will take the PMP exam. There's real value in becoming more professional even if we don't become a profession.

The various project worlds can learn from each other. While designing and constructing buildings is different from designing and coding software, planning and managing the projects is often more alike than not. In Johanna Rothman's post Invest in the Design of Your Project Every Day, she encourages us to be ready to change the plan each day.

We've all see the phenomenon that as soon as you've scheduled the project, the schedule is out of date. If you plan to invest in replanning and rescheduling, that doesn't matter.

Note: Johanna is not saying change your goals or your overall promise to the customer. She's also not encouraging that we make changes in a vacuum. The key is to be responsible…to your customer, to other members of the team, and to yourself.

One-time planning can't anticipate ALL of what we must deal with to succeed with our projects. Neither will solo-planning. So, do as Johanna suggests, build-in regular cycles for replanning, and do it collaboratively.

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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Will NASA really answer your questions? Not likely. But ASK Magazine is a great resource for project managers. The articles and stories are practical. You couldn't ask for more. In the latest issue Scott Tibbitts writes about The Morning Meeting. The article does a great job of showing the benefits of a project organization that keeps its attention on commitment-making and fulfilling. Take a few minutes to read Scott's article. You are sure to come away with two or three things you can implement immediately.

Did the title get your attention? It got mine! Naked Consulting is David Schmaltz' latest series of articles in his Compass Newsletter. He's written on the subject in the last three issues. I urge you to have a look. But do yourself a favor, print the newsletter. The articles are just a few pages and well worth your time.

David is the author of the widely acclaimed book on project management The Blind Men and the Elephant. About a year ago Greg Howell and I interviewed him on a teleconference: David Schmaltz Was a Hit! I've also had the pleasure of speaking at the same conference with him. I'll just say it was quite provocative. As was David's comments that led to one of the more important Project e-Tips 017: Produce Coherence Among Project Participants. David has a way of pushing me to the edge of the box (and then some).

So what is in this latest Compass Newsletter? In my opinion David offers one of the most useful descriptions of what consultants can do for you that I've ever read. He calls it Brief Consulting™. Read the rest of this entry ¶

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.

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Last week I proposed a set of meeting protocols for conducting projects on a lean basis. These protocols are used with the Last Planner System®. The first protocol is for the Look-Ahead Planning (LAP) meeting.

The point of the LAP meeting is to establish a plan that can be accomplished that closely matches what should be accomplished to meet the overall objectives of the project. I think of this meeting as the occasion for crafting or preparing the set of requests that will be made of the performers in the coming weeks. It is a meeting that the would-be performers attend. Those would-be performers look for the conditions of each up-coming task that would keep them from making a reliable promise at the time that a promise is needed. The lean project community calls those conditions constraints.

There are four objectives for the LAP meeting:

1. Establish the basis for weekly work planning — promising — in the coming week including identifying workable backlog.
2. To surface constraints.
3. To secure and manage the promises for removal of constraints.
4. To introduce the performers to the coming work.

A usual look-ahead plan has a six-week horizon. The meeting starts with a review of the coming week. Care is given to assess any remaining conditions (constraints) that would keep someone from making a reliable promise on the coming week's workplan. The project manager reviews any remaining constraints, the promises for removal, and then with the performers authorizes a set of requests for the coming week.

Next up is looking at week two on the LAP to see what work can be made available as workable backlog. The group evaluates what unconstrained work could be performed early if either a performer gets ahead or if there is some reason that would prevent the performer from doing the work as promised. The planning conversation ends by authorizing some subset of the second week's work as workable backlog. The group understands only the work authorized in the group conversation is to be workable backlog. This keeps people from doing work that could be out of sequence that would cause difficulty or rework for themselves or others.

The conversation then moves to a review of weeks three through five. There are two keys in this part of the meeting. The first is to review the completion of the promises for removing constraints. The second is to surface more constraints. The process of reviewing the coming work for six weeks has the effect of sharpening the group's attention. Invariably, no sooner has the group removed all the known constraints for a set of tasks than someone comes up with more constraints. During this conversation people are asked to make clear promises including completion dates for removing the constraints. People report complete on previous promises. The project manager updates the plan marking those tasks with no constraints "Ready for Promising".

Finally, the new sixth week of the plan is introduced to the group. For many of the performers they will be quite familiar with the new details because they were involved in establishing those plan details. The project manager highlights interactions of performers in the new work and asks them to identify constraints.

The meeting ends with a Plus-Delta (+Δ) — what produced value? and what might produce more value?

Depending on the complexity of the project and size of the project team these meetings can range anywhere from 30 minutes to 90 minutes.

Next up: the weekly work planning meeting…

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Tonight I speak at the Seattle chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI) on the paper I co-authored with Greg Howell, Leadership and Project Management: Time for a Change from Fayol to Flores. A few months back when I was exploring what the talk would be about I had no idea that Stephen Covey had a book he would be publishing, let alone that he would tackle a subject as grand as greatness, The Eighth Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness.

I started this weblog 2½ years ago to explore what was working and not working in the field of delivering projects. I had no idea where that exploration would take me. Early this year I found myself writing about team member and team leader resignation, patterns of not speaking and not listening, and the pervasiveness of thinking that a plan can be put in place that others will be controlled to. Greg Howell and I wrote a second paper, Two Great Wastes in Organizations and Teams which together with the first was presented at the International Group for Lean Construction 12th Annual Conference in Denmark (IGLC-12). Along the way I began to notice others writing about my discomfort, Feudal Model for Project Management? Eventually, I prepared a concise posting for this weblog, Leave Behind Century-Old Management Theory. But with all my thinking, conversation, and writing, it's taken Stephen Covey to bring this into focus for me.

Covey calls the 8th habit (action): finding your voice and helping others find their voice. Covey says that in doing so we can move from effectiveness to greatness. For now, I will limit my thoughts to just being effective on our projects. I have yet to read the book; I will. Until then, I have two clear thoughts (for now) on what we must deal with to reach effectiveness.

• Interrupting My Resignation
  How is it that we are stuck with our resignation? What story do we keep telling ourselves about who we are in the world and who others are? Where did that story originate? What must I do to start telling a new story?
   
• Engage Committedly with Others
  All work on projects is for keeping some commitment to a client or customer. We call that work a project in part because it takes more than one person to fulfill that promise. We need a habit of making and securing reliable promises with other project participants. It is only through our collective committed actions that we will keep our promise to the client and leave ourselves in a condition to learn, to cope with changes, and to innovate.

We're long overdue for replacing Feudalism with an enlightened form of leadership and management. As Covey says, "Find your voice." Decide for yourself there's no reason for resignation. Speak. Listen. And create a habit of promising.

Organizational change is one of the harder changes to make. It takes leadership, attention, and changes in routines. I prepared today's e-Tip for project managers and project executives who are introducing lean project delivery approaches.

The Project Reformer's e-Tip of the Week

038: Start Using a "To-Don't List"

Bosses listen up… How you spend your time matters far more than what you say when it comes to your staff or project team members. Are you holed up in your office or out where the work of the project happens? Do you stop when you walk a jobsite to fix a safety railing, pick up trash, and help someone struggling with a difficult task? Do you spend vastly more time asking questions or do you give direction? Make no mistake, your staff and your team notice how you spend your time. They watch so they can survive. It's that simple. Want to produce change? You need to give as much attention to what you choose not to do as you give to what you say is important. Focus. That's right, focus. Do one, maybe two things intensely for an extended period of time. I'm not saying the organization should stop doing everything else. No. I'm saying for you to stop doing everything else. Put all those other things on your "To-Don't List." That "To-Don't List" is a source to give your staff development opportunities. You can't bring about change if you haven't changed what you put on your calendar. Full stop. This Project e-Tip was inspired by Tom Peters' manifesto This I Believe appearing on