Break-Set..."A plan is only a common base for change"

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In the movie Hunt for Red October (play trailer) Sean Connery, the Soviet sub commander, is faced with a critical decision when a torpedo is fired at his sub; follow the check-list procedure or pause. He decides to delay action as the torpedo closes on his ship. A few seconds before impact he orders the sub to turn, the torpedo misses. A critical moment in the battle. He broke-set.

Connery did what fast teams do, they break-set frequently. Had he followed the check list the torpedo would have hit his ship. Teams do this also, they move in lock-step, following process/procedures and fall off a cliff, as a group!

On the other hand, we observed fast teams frequently breaking-set in order to stay alert and make incremental adjustments to hit their target. They broke-set before the project slipped and before they had a crisis. They created change. Typically teams reduce change and when they have to break-set they have to make large course corrections, which takes time. Further, teams that tried to execute to their plan, more times than not, had overruns. When you try to follow a plan you typically miss it, but break-plan and pull-in and your chances of success increase.

An Israeli General once commented that "a plan is only a common base for change."

Comments

[Mark Edmonds]

A good way to break-set is to challenge the way you do things. A key best practice is to use the schedule to manage the work, the team and ultimately accelerate the program. This is a good thing; after all, who wouldn't want a team and a schedule completely aligned and in sync?

However, if your schedule is showing you that you are late by many weeks or months, following the schedule as planned may not get you to the target on time. Working harder doesn't always work. Alternative ways of working are needed but they can be hard to see if your head is completely locked into the schedule and doing things the way you've always done them.

The Challenge process (http://fastlog.typepad.com/weblog/2008/04/challenge-your.html) is an affective way to get the team to think "out of the box" by challenging the way they are doing things and find alternative ways of working - ones that will cause the schedule to accelerate. In other words, the team break-sets.

The advantage of the Challenge process is that it can be done any time. The program doesn't need to be in trouble and it doesn't need to be late. The best teams challenge themselves on a periodic basis, just to explore better ways of doing the program and achieving the same goal.

We did this recently at a client and even though they couldn't find ways of pulling in the schedule, by challenging the way they were building customer samples, they pulled in the schedule 2 weeks and are now ahead of schedule.