Are your projects unpredictable? Maybe they are a bit like my mother’s cakes!
Better cakes, better projects
My mother wasn’t a great fan of recipes. She had some cookery books, but didn’t always use them. She often baked a cake without using a recipe. Consequently, our family had some great cakes, but also a lot of middling cakes, and a few disasters. Unpredictable.
Does that sound familiar to project managers? Your projects may be a similar mix - few great projects, a lot of middling projects and some disasters.
If your baking was unpredictable, how would you improve it? You would need to start using recipes. And start taking notes on each recipe: “the oven should be at 200°C not 180°C”; or, “this recipe would be better with two eggs". Those notes help you tweak the recipe to improve the result. So next time you bake, try using two eggs. Or try baking at 200°C
To improve your projects, you need the same approach. But we’ll talk about processes instead of cake recipes. And we’ll need continuous improvement, instead of tweaks.
The objective is to get your projects under control. You need defined project management processes (your recipes), and you need feedback from real-world projects (that’s your notes suggesting tweaks). Then test out the revised processes in the next projects. That’s a cycle of continuous improvement.
click here to continue reading about
Donald J. Wheeler's Four States of Control
W. Edwards Deming's SDCA cycle
My recipe for baking better projects
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