Learn from Lean: use Collaborative Design for faster and cheaper projects

 When should a project manager plan to use the project budget? Should you keep a lot of budget in reserve for the last part of the project, to fire-fight problems? Intuitively, the answer is YES.

But the answer from Lean is NO. You should invest up-front in Collaborative Design. You will have fewer fires to fight. This article explains why.

Collaborative Design in Lean Manufacturing

Lean Project Management is based on Lean Manufacturing. Lean Manufacturing was pioneered in Japan by Toyota and Honda. Collaborative design was an integral part of the success of Lean Manufacturing.

It’s often hard to transfer concepts from Lean Manufacturing to Lean Project Manufacturing. But in this case it’s easy, because Collaborative Design comes from Lean’s new product introduction: for automobile manufacturers, introducing a new car is a project. Toyota and Honda pioneered Collaborative Design to optimise their project success.

It’s explained in the excellent book The Machine that Changed the World : the Story of Lean Production by James Womack et al.

In the best lean projects, the numbers of people involved are highest at the very outset. All the relevant specialities are present, and the project manager’s job is to force the group to confront all the difficult trade-offs they’ll have to make to agree on the project. As development proceeds, the number of people involved drops…

In many mass production design exercises, the number of people involved is very small at the outset but grows to a peak very close to time of launch… to resolve problems that should have been cleared up in the beginning.

The budget is spent very differently in Lean: it’s spent upfront. Whereas in Mass Production, it’s saved for downstream trouble-shooting.

Let’s draw this as a graph. Let’s compare two projects which have the same budget in man-days (effort). We see that the two graphs of effort against time are very different.

Collaborative Design drives project success. The authors quote some figures:

• cheaper: a nearly two-to-one reduction in effort
• faster: a saving of one-third in time

Collaborative Design in Project Management

Let’s bring this back from automobiles to project management.

A lot of projects follow the same curve as Mass Production. Planning is largely a solitary activity, mostly done by the project manager. Resources are added down-stream to firefight problems late in the project.

Collaborative Design brings together the key stakeholders (such as work package owners, subject matter experts and users) ...

Read the rest of the article here

•  to see other comparative graphs 
•  understand the three features of Collaborative Design
  

Use recipes to bake better projects

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

Why Lean PMOs use CoPs not policemen

How do you improve project management in an organisation? The "classical" solution was to create a PMO (a project management office). The PMO published standards, then told everyone to use their new standards.

That approach often failed for two reasons. Firstly, the standards were heavy and impractical, written by PMO "experts". And secondly, the PMO became the enforcer of standards. They became the Project Police.

There is a Lean alternative. The way forward is to use CoPs, not policemen.

A CoP is a community of practice

A CoP is a community of practice. It brings together practitioners to share knowledge, problems and ideas. Many organisations in various areas (government, education, web content, ...) have started to use communities of practice. They recognise that more and more people are knowledge workers; and that sharing knowledge adds value.

Knowledge is not centralised. It is spread around the organisation. Many people have knowledge, not just the "experts". The community of practice brings together practitioners to harvest knowledge. The CoP is linked to a domain (such as Project Management). For example, at Stanford University, there are about 50 CoPs, each working on one domain.

Feedback from practitioners is new knowledge

The old top-down model for project management assumed that the PMO were the "experts". The experts had a monopoly of knowledge, so they published the standards. In practice, the standards weren't always great - they were too complex, and heavy to use in practice.

An organisation that values its knowledge workers uses a different approach. It uses a collaborative model, rather than a top-down model.

The CoP is the heart of this collaborative model. It creates a feedback loop on project management standards. The practitioners who work in real-world projects provide feedback (what works? what needs improvement?) Their feedback creates new knowledge. And when that knowledge is used to improve the standards, it adds value. The CoP becomes part of a value chain.

Iterate to improve

The modern organisation wants to be more agile. People now recognise that project management is a complex problem. Faced with such complexity, the agile approach is to discover the solution over a period of time, iteratively. There is no perfect solution that an expert can specify at their desk.

Finding a solution requires feedback: the early solution is tested in use, and then refined. The solution emerges iteratively, over a period of time.

The community of practice is the perfect tool for getting feedback. The CoP provides the feedback from project managers who are trying to use the standards.

In this context, the Lean PMO has a new role to play. They are no longer the "experts". The PMO may propose some standards (draft versions or prototypes). But their key role is to stimulate iterative improvement, driven by the community. This results in practical, workable standards that project teams will use.

Create a community of practice (CoP) to drive improvements

The CoP must be focussed. It's not a talking shop, to swap stories or moan about problems. The CoP engages project managers in the creation and evolution of standards. This ensures that the standards are practical and applicable to real-world projects.

The focus is on continuous improvement:

• what works?
• what is broken?
• how can we improve things?

Here are some examples

• A template that is too complex and hard to use
• A reporting requirement that generates hours of work each week
• A procedure that no longer works
• A great new tool for tracking issues

To maintain focus, the PMO commits to listening to the CoP, and taking on board their ideas. It's the feedback from the community of practice that drives the new versions of the standards and adds value.

How does the Lean PMO set up a community of practice?

• Define your starting point. Pull together your current good practice into one place. Collate everything into a document or a website (your procedures, processes, tools, templates, etc.). This is your draft standard, version 0.1.
• Find some good people. Find project management practitioners who want to get things done better.
• Get your CoP moving. Set up a simple, light process for discussing and sharing. Add a simple tool (e.g. Slack or a micro-website).
• Keep the CoP focussed. The focus is continual improvement. Keep things light and lean. Avoid long meetings - project managers are busy people.
• Add value. Use the feedback from the CoP to improve your standards. Publish new versions of standards (templates version 2.0, procedures version 1.1, and so on).
• Communicate. Tell everyone how that the CoP is driving improvement, and how the process is adding value.
• Iterate. Keep going. Improvement is an ongoing, long-term process.

Other benefits of CoPs in the Project Management domain

The community of practice is especially useful in the project management domain

• Many projects span organisational and geographic boundaries. In the same way, the CoP goes beyond the silo organisation. It is a community of project managers, regardless of organisational and geographic boundaries.
• Many project managers start their careers as subject matter experts. As the years go by, they become project management experts. The CoP helps this transition. It boosts the visibility of the project management domain. Thereby, it helps professionalise project management.

Read more about CoPs here

CoPs not police

The bottom line is that if you are a PMO struggling to impose your standards, then stop trying to be a policeman. Think CoPs not police.

This blog is part of a series about the Lean PMO, which will form the basis of a new Lean3 book. Find out more at LeanPub

Toyota is not just a car maker. Are you just a project manager?

Toyota is the home of Lean Manufacturing. In the 50's, Toyota developed the Toyota Production System, which became Lean Manufacturing. All world-class manufacturing today uses Lean.

There's a classic article by Charles Fishman in Fast Company, published in 2006. It analyses continuous improvement at Toyota’s factory in Georgetown, USA.

Lean means Continuous Improvement

The author argues that Toyota is not just a car maker.

Here's the key quote

Toyota’s Georgetown factory only looks like a car factory. It’s really a big brain–a kind of laboratory focused on a single mission: not how to make cars, but how to make cars better.
The work is threefold: making cars, making cars better, and teaching everyone how to make cars better.
At its best, Toyota adds one more level: It is always looking to improve the process by which it improves all the other processes.

Project Management needs Continuous Improvement, too

Are you just a project manager?
Or are you a Lean Project Manager with a focus on Continuous Improvement
To qualify as a Lean Project Manager, your work would be threefold

1. Running projects
2. Improving your project management process
3. Teaching everyone how to improve your project management process

And are you at your best - do you add one more level? Are you always looking to improve the process by which you improve your project management process?

From Lean Manufacturing to Lean3 Project Management

Toyota makes it appear easy, by building continuous improvement into their culture. Read the Fast Company article to find out how they do it.
You can do the same for your projects. You can build continuous improvement into your Project Management. Read my new book Lean3 Project Management to find out how you can do it.

Avoid overload: manage your personal and project bandwidth

A trap is waiting for you in today’s busy world, where everyone is under pressure to get things done, lots of things. Do it all today! Get things done now!

The trap is multi-tasking. If you try to do too much at once, you lose focus and become less productive. It’s a trap at the personal level, and it’s a trap for project teams too.

To avoid the trap, you need to recognise your limits. A person has limited “band-width”.  And so does a team, a project or a company.

Multi-tasking sounds attractive. It’s a fashionable term borrowed from the world of computing. But if it’s great for computers, it’s a trap for humans when it overloads you. Overload destroys your focus and your productivity. If a task needs some prolonged concentration, some serious brain-work, then you need to reduce your multi-tasking.

It’s a trap that project managers can fall into. Some project managers abandon good practice and try to run their project using a to-do list. They are inviting overload and burn-out.

There are several easy and effective ways to avoid the trap.

1) At the personal level, and for small teams, Kanban approaches can work well. Kanban is a “lean” technique, where you have a backlog of work (your to-do list) but you limit the work in progress using a visual planner. For example, you may decide that only one task per person can be “in progress”. When the task is finished, start another. If you don’t finish it, put it back on the backlog list, then start another. (Read more about personal kanbans here)

2) At the project level, traditional methods like Prince2 use planning and delegation to maintain focus, while Agile methods use scope management.

    ❑    Prince2 uses planning to focus on your current work: Prince2 breaks the project into stages, and the project manager focuses on one stage at time. Prince2 has a simple and effective planning technique – with a clear and simple stage plan, you know what work needs to be done this week or this month. The plan replaces the to-do list and allows the project manager to focus on a limited number of current tasks.

    ❑    Prince2 uses delegation to sharpen your focus: Prince2 breaks the work into deliverables (or “products”) that are delegated to sub-teams. Each team has its own team manager, and the project manager doesn’t micro-manage the sub-teams. The delegation of work reduces the load on the Project Manager, who can focus on managing the project (rather than on doing the work).

    ❑    Agile approaches often focus on delivering just the right scope. Methods like ATERN (also known as AgilePM) use MuSCoW prioritisation as a way to avoid overload. Business needs are prioritised as “Must Have”, “Should Have”, “Could Have” or “Won’t Have”. If the project manager or the teams are overloaded, they concentrate on the “Must Have” needs. They know how to focus – they reduce their bandwidth, knowing that the “Should Have” and “Could Have” needs can wait.

3) Sometimes the problem is wider than the single project; it’s at the portfolio management level. Companies need to avoid overload, they too have limited bandwidth for change. MoP (Management of Portfolio) addresses this with portfolio prioritisation models, which can take into account both resource capacity (do we have enough people?) and resource capability (do we have the skills?)

So next time you need to handle pressure, don’t just build a to-do list. Don’t try to do everything at once - multi-tasking is a trap that can destroy your productivity.

That glitzy to-do list app on your smart-phone is tempting. It’s perhaps a good tool, but it shouldn’t be the only the only tool in your toolbox. Don’t run your life or your project using a to-do list, you will run into overload and stress. Widen your horizons; add some additional tools to your toolbox, either traditional tools like planning and delegation or innovative ones like Kanban and MoSCoW.

Lean: multi-functional project teams

Lean or not lean? I'm struggling to get multi-functional teams working in our programme. Today, our programme organisation mirrors the current business teams (the BAU "silos"). In the coming months we have some major deliverables to produce, where all functional teams must cooperate. With today's organisation, the teams can't readily plan their work, as they each have a silo view - they are highly dependent on other teams for scheduling and decisions, for inputs and outputs.

The lean approach is to maximise cross functional team work. Each multi-functional team can then work back from the deliverable due date and manage its own work plan. The cross functional team produces a single, unified deliverable. It has its own internal communications (meetings, chats, virtual spaces...)

That's lean project management.