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.
Refresh Planning is a core practice of fast teams. Refresh Planning involves three steps; update, break-down, and pull-in. It’s a weekly team activity. They look back in time to record what they did and didn’t get done, then decompose near-term long duration critical path tasks, and then use the more granular and detailed schedule to reconfigure the work in order to accelerate it. In order to be on time, they know they need to pull-in the schedule every week.
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.
Micro Macro Roll-up is a planning philosophy based on the best practices of fast teams. In this screencast called “Part A” I’ll discuss the concept and show you how we’ve implemented it using fastProject.
The long pole in the tent holds the tent up. It determines the height of the tent. The long pole in a project is the critical path. It is the longest contiguous path, from start to end, that forms the overall project duration. The long pole in the project tent drives the end date.
Our goal is to accelerate projects; to make them go faster, to finish on time or early.
A core best practice of fast teams we’ve studied is to consciously work to the early schedule. They do it early, rather than waiting until the last minute. How do you get teams to behave this way given it runs contrary to human nature?
You can also watch this screencast directly on youtube in HD--select 720HD for the best resolution.
The underlying concept is to track schedule trends and use the movement to predict future events and/or to generate energy today to influence the future.
I liked this WiggleChart and the annotation “resources reallocated.” This before-the-fact warning system indicated to this team that they had a negative trend. Resources had been gradually sucked off of this project and placed on other projects that where determined to be higher priority. The result was the slip that started when resources left the project (see red arrow). It took about 6 weeks of trend information to alert the team that the loss of resources were impacting the schedule.
“You have to accelerate the schedule in order to be on time.” In other words, you need to pull-in the schedule just to be able to meet the committed target date. This is called "time banking." You accelerate to gain time now, since you know unexpected things will happen in the future, where you will need to use that banked time. What is certain, is uncertainty! Only a fool assumes a plan will materialize as planned!
