It seems odd to ask this question (Why accelerate?), since it’s obvious in the technology business that you die if you don’t release new products faster than your competition. Fast teams know this reality and communicate the “need for speed” to the engineering teams. In slow environments, this critical information is insulated from the technical teams and only reserved for marketing, finance, and leadership forums.
Since Steve Jobs died, many have tried to retrospectively discover what made him successful… what were the special things he did differently than those “mere mortals” driving around in Silicon Valley in fancy cars?
One in particular concerns the “Reality Distortion Field” which apparently was his trick of getting "10 pounds of flour to fit into a 5 pound sack." In other words, to get people to do impossible things in a shorter period of time than they believed was possible.
With his passing, this super-hero skill has been built up into an almost magical power. I don’t buy the “magic” part.
We advise clients to refresh their schedules twice a week (at a minimum).
Often, we observe that teams only seem to look at their schedules once a week, when they do the refresh. So increasing the frequency increases the awareness of the schedule, and time in general.
Best-in-class teams do refreshes three or more times a week. The fastest teams we’ve worked with do it every day (<15 min/session). One client recently had six teams doing it twice a day on a very time senstive program.
Refresh Planning... The weekly rhythm of refreshes is what makes them work. Team members know they are accountable to their colleagues every week at a set time. It can’t move and it can’t be postponed. And doing them more than once a week is even better, but they must be short and crisp value-added events.
The rhythm is what makes it work. It is the first regular discipline that most teams experience and it is the start of gaining control over the schedule. Late, postponed, missed meetings never help a project finish faster.
I’ll review the concepts underlying our Acceleration Workshop in this screencast.
We’ve successfully used this process to “discover” strategic schedule pull-in opportunities on complex projects. By “strategic” I mean large schedule acceleration opportunities, for example in one recent case… a 6-month pull-in on a 20 month program by using this team engagement approach. The trick is to harness the collective intelligence of a group of people in order to get them to “innovate” on the schedule, in the same way they “innovate” to create technology.
Mr Harford’s thesis is that failure is a critical element of learning, and learning is the basis of improvement… continuous improvement generates business success. It’s a fundamental engineering principal that innovation can only be achieved through successive failures. Discovering the root cause of failure enable solutions to be found. Innovation therefore can be accelerated through the acceleration of the “failure/analysis” learning cycle. “Fail-Fast” as some have said. The faster you fail, the faster you learn.
A consistent and fundamental problem we see in our practice is too many projects and not enough resources (people, materials, equipment, and money). Why?
Each project has revenue associated with it. This revenue is part of a portfolio of projects. The revenue is needed to justify the expenses (capex and opex). The more projects in the portfolio... the more potential revenue, so the logic goes.
Cut projects... then "the business plan does not work anymore." So the projects stay, even some that are past their market window, causing low/no ROI at best when they finally reach the market. Yet these "dogs" continue to suck valuable resources from the portfolio. Rarely do we see the project portfolio rationalized with the available resources. This is too scary for most companies.
