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
  

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.

PM2 : Government isn't a community

PM2: Government isn't a community

In January, the European Commission published PM2. This is yet another Project Management framework created by yet another government body. This is the wrong initiative, done in the wrong way.

The world doesn't need another top-down government-inspired initiative. More so-called "best practice". We already have the PMI from the US, Prince2 from the UK, and several others. PM2 adds nothing new, it just reassembles the existing pieces in a different way.

A new set of rules

Government-driven methods attempt to codify "best practice" in a book. This "bible" is a static set of rules which is defined to be "best practice". It becomes the basis for compliance and creates an ever-growing training and certification industry. Henceforth, every CV must include certification. Everyone who wants funding must follow the rules.

PM2 follows this pattern. It is driven by a set of rules, not a community of practice. Maybe it's called Open PM2, but there are no clear feedback mechanisms to ensure that "best practice" does actually work. There is a network around PM2 (PSN), but the focus is implementing the method, and especially on training and certification. This will surely become a community of compliance rather than a community of practice.

Need a new approach

Agile has shown the way. There is a real, innovative community around Scrum, sharing good practice. Good practice evolves, bottom-up, driven by community feedback. SAFE explicitly promotes communities of practice (SAFE is a scaled approach to Scrum).

Beyond Agile, the wider Project Management world also needs to move to communities of practice. We don't need yet another top-down method like PM2. We need a bottom-up approach, based on  communities of practice. Each community will identify good practice, proven in day-by-day use. Ideas will be shared using modern social networking techniques.

This is the forward-looking approach proposed by Lean3. Sadly, PM2 is not forward-looking, it's just a rehash of old ideas, just another set of rules.

Why I stopped blogging (and why I'm starting again)

I stopped writing this blog in May 2015 

I stopped because it was time to be less evangelical about Prince2. It was time to start facing up to the truth.

My blogs were "explaining" Best Practice, as defined by Prince2. They were broadly uncritical. I assumed that Prince2 was "Best Practice", and explained how to get it to work.

For example, I explained how to analyse risk. I knew that,  until you simplify the Prince2 risk approach, it's not usable. I knew that no-one uses the Prince2 "Best Practice".

Same with communications. I wrote a blog on communications. Prince2 has an unusable "Communications Strategy". No-one uses the four strategies in Prince2. Again, I was blogging to explain how to convert  so-called "Best Practice" into real workable practice.

This incessant need for simplification told me that Prince2 is not "Best Practice"...  It was time to wake up.

In 2015, I faced up to the facts: the term "Best Practice" is now meaningless. So I stopped writing this blog.

Since then, things have got worse

Prince2-Agile was a car crash

In June 2015, Axelos launched Prince2-Agile, a new companion guide to Prince2. This guide purports to explain how to combine Prince2 with Agile.

But it was a car crash. All of Prince2 meets all of Agile in a mammoth mash-up. The premise of the book is to use Prince2 in its entirety (all 7 processes and all 7 themes), then to add Agile. The resulting behemoth (P2 + P2A = 700 pages and 2kg of paper) is hard to explain, let alone to defend.

 Even the most evangelical supporters of Prince2 struggle with this. This is not "Best Practice". No one introduces Agile into projects like this. I know how people blend Prince2 and Agile, and it's not like this.

Prince2 needed a diet, got a sugar rush

In 2017, Axelos updated Prince2. Prince2 was aging. It was fat and bloated, full of junk that no-one uses. Put instead of sending Prince2 to a health farm, to lose weight, Axelos added more fat. More bloat.  Prince2 grew to over 400 pages.
The new book now wants the Project Manager to become a methods expert, and to tailor Prince2 for each project. That's not Best Practice. In most well-organised companies using Prince2, the corporate PMO downsizes Prince2 massively. Once.

I'm starting blogging again

I'm starting to blog again. I'm starting to blog about Lean3, a new approach to Project Management.
I've not given up on Prince2. It's a tool we can still use, but it's fossilised and we need to plan for the future. Prince2 is our past.

Lean3 rejects the idea of frozen "Best Practice", written by a guru and published in an expensive book. Lean3 will have strong feedback from the community, using social media techniques.

Lean3 argues that each community of practice should define its own good practice. Good practice which is used and proven in practice.

Read more about Lean3 at www.lean3.com