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
  

Lessons from the Bushfires: understand stakeholders to communicate better

Lessons from the Bushfires

Communication is a critical success factor in project and programme management. To communicate successfully, you must analyse your stakeholders correctly.

Australia has suffered horrendous fires in the past few months. The authorities evacuated tens of thousands of people from their houses.

That required a lot of organisation and a lot of communication.

The public authorities struggled to communicate effectively. How to give the right advice to people? How to get them to listen? How to ensure householders react correctly?

For the authorities, there were two types of householders - those who will evacuate; and those who won't.

But that was too simple.

Analyse your Stakeholders

An Australian researcher, Dr Ken Stahan, has come up with 7 types of householder

• Threat Denier: they deny that a threat exists
• Responsibility Denier: they do not believe that they are responsible for themselves
• Dependent Evacuator: they are unable to take responsibility for their safe evacuation
• Considered Evacuator: they are determined to safely evacuate
• Community Guided: they look to advice and guidance from their community
• Worried Waverers: they want to remain. They worry that they lack the experience to remain successfully
• Experienced Independents: they are experienced with bushfires and are self-reliant and well prepared. They are committed to remaining but in unfavourable circumstances may evacuate.

(You can listen to Ken Stahan talking about his 7 types on Australian RN radio here)

Once you know there are seven types of stakeholder, you can communicate so much better. For each category, there can be a tailored communication - the channel, the timings, the content.

The next step in Australia is to get this working. Ken Stahan's idea is to use questionnaires, to better understand householders. To categorise stakeholders correctly.

That's the key: understand your stakeholders before you communicate.