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.
A number of clients have asked for screencasts that track with the lectures we give in our class called "Introduction to FTTM Program Management." I've collected (below) a series of posts that roughly follow the flow of the class.
FTTM is fast-time-to-market. In this screencast, I’ll discuss a project planning and tracking process, which has evolved over a 20 year period and through our work on thousands of client projects.
The foundation of this process is based on the best practices of fast teams, who we’ve been studying since the early 1990’s.
“It’s better to roughly right, than exactly wrong.” Roughly right is the philosophy of fast teams, since they know that things can be continuous improved over time. The same idea applies to their schedules, which are “a common base for change.” They are dynamic living tools that must reflect what is actually going on in the project in order to be of predictive value.
We implement this concept through continuous and frequent “low-overhead” cycles of refreshes, more on that idea later.
Freedom to act, or in many cases “the lack of freedom” is a root cause of delay, apathy, and a general feeling of helplessness. Regardless of the position in the corporation, we see the “lack of empowerment” from the very top to the bottom of the reporting chain. This post is about a system we adapted called “Freedom Scale.” This originated from our best practice research into factors that drove speed — fast organizations empowered people with “freedom” to act quickly. Pushing power down the hierarchy increases speed to market.
There’s usually a gap between when something is wanted and when something can be delivered. Sometimes it is known, often times it is “felt” — yet teams lack data to prove it. Sometimes when its known, attempts are made to ignore the gap for fear that the gap will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet “knowing the gap” can be a powerful tool to create a sense of urgency, well before-the-fact. This is a key element of why fast teams are fast to market. Sometimes called an “early schedule” mindset, its counter intuitive, and hard to do, which is why it is not common practice. Lets explore the concept further.
