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How to Get Productive Project Teamwork from Distributed Teams
Managing any project team can be challenging. Managing a distributed team is a challenge cubed. In any project, coordinating the workflow among your resources is almost always difficult. When multiple...
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Synchronizing the Right Work, at Right Time, Regardless of Distance
The foundation of teamwork is having a shared vision of the situation. From that, the team can create an action plan to move towards a common objective. When the team is dispersed on different...
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Imposing a Common Deadline on Remote Teams
It’s rare to find a project without a deadline. Due dates and deadlines drive the entire project management process. I’m not talking about the dates for each task (which is wise to avoid), but dates...
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Basing Promises on an Enterprise-Wide Understanding of Capacity
In my last blog post, I talked about how to manage deadlines when your teams are geographically dispersed. How to create those deadlines? Anyone can guess – and we do – a lot. Sometimes, those...
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Making Realistic Risk Assessments with Remote Teams
In my previous post on making project delivery promises, I wrote about the need to set delivery dates based on a clear understanding of capacity and workload. During project execution, the promises...
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Visualizing Projects: “Planning” Won’t Dispel The Darkness
This is where most project plans begin and end: in the dark. Why are projects late? If you’re responsible for the performance of a project team, you may be tempted to blame the usual suspects: it’s...
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Visualizing Projects: Why Meetings Suck
The existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, once observed that, “Hell is other people.” He wasn’t quite right. Hell is other people, in a closed room, looking to assign blame for yet another...
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Visualizing Projects: Start With a Clean Slate
In just a few minutes, everyone will share one common understanding of what needs to be done and who needs to do it. Let’s get rid of the room. Let’s get rid of the chairs. While we’re at it, let’s get...
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Visualizing Projects: What Do You Need to Manage?
The vertical columns of process steps are complemented with horizontal rows of….whatever is most relevant for you to manage in order to fulfill the process steps. These can be (but are not limited to):...
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Visualizing Projects: Now You Can See the Priorities
By posting all the project tasks to ONE board, and attributing a status to each task, your team instantly moves its attention from a competing body of tasks to a SINGLE project, openly displayed. In...
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Visualizing Projects: Bring Work in Progress Under Control
Multi-tasking: the dark art of doing many things…poorly. Every time an engineer, a designer, an operator – or anybody – has to switch from one task to another, valuable time is lost. When the former...
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Visualizing Projects: Measure the Right Things to Get the Right Behaviors
There is constant tension among project team members when their individual or functional objectives are not in alignment with the project’s objectives (i.e., maximizing resource efficiency is not the...
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Little’s Law – The ONE thing you can do to improve process performance
Is your system in chaos? What do I mean by chaos? I mean resource shortages, priority battles, constant expediting, too much work in process, or too much rework. Everything just takes too long....
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Multitasking is Evil – The Number One Killer of Project Productivity
Is multitasking a good thing? Most think that multitasking is a good skill to have; chewing gum and walking, reading and breathing, texting and driving (but you don’t do that, do you?). Even though we...
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How to Build a Reliable Delivery Process
Despite the advances in information technology and systems, most plants manage the process of prioritizing and managing the production of customer orders as if it were an art, approaching the task as a...
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How to Build a Reliable Delivery Process: Planning
Install a Master Scheduler A single, master plan drives the Maximum Flow System and the planning process is the responsibility of the master scheduler; he/she owns the process. While that may seem like...
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How to Build a Reliable Delivery Process: Synchronized Execution
The Production Manager Owns Execution Often, the responsibility for execution is split up among functions or it’s not clear who is responsible for the entire process. There can be no question of who is...
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How to Build a Reliable Delivery Process: Teamwork
The entire team must participate to make delivery reliable. It isn’t just the operations or production departments. Perfect execution is a commitment for the whole organization. Involving people begins...
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How to Build a Reliable Delivery Process: Promise to be on Time
Being on time begins with setting the expectation with the customer, promising delivery when it can actually be completed. Order delivery promising must reflect available capacity. Just as you manage...
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Is There a Standard to Project Execution? The Project Execution Maturity Model
What do managers do when their project teams are unsuccessful? You probably do what most managers do and send them for project management skills training. There is some evidence that shows more skills...
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