An article on CIO.com about Why IT project still fail gets me riled up. All the reasons listed are simply solutions in reverse - solutions that get suggested over and over again in various venues. The fact that projects “still” fail might suggest that these problems aren’t the real problem, that they are symptoms of a deeper cause. It’s only once we resolve the deeper cause that the problems will lessen or go away entirely.
All in project management
What decision mode are you in? Does lack of clarity here cause you to get stuck in endless discussions and “undoing” decisions that you thought were already set? Here’s a way to think about decisions from the angle of decision-making authority.
Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag has taken on the mantle of writing a business novel in the style of her father, Eli Goldratt. Goldratt’s Rules of Flow takes Eli Goldratt’s “Four Concepts of Flow” into project management environments and shows how some basic rules of flow can significantly reduce the chaos and improve results.
To enable your work to flow faster, find those places where work just sits and waits. Is there a large queue of work waiting for the next operation? Is there a queue waiting for someone’s approval? Is there a queue waiting for missing inputs? All of these are opportunities to remove queues, and move the whole project faster.
The TOCICO hosted an online Critical Chain 2020 conference this week. As it seems most online conferences are running, the talks themselves were pre-recorded and the speakers were available in chat during their talk, and this conference had live Q&A immediately following each speaker. This made for fewer talks overall, but good opportunity to learn a bit more from the presenters and other attendees. Examples in the conference ranged across multiple industries (aerospace, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, etc) and application areas (manufacturing, product development, information technology, etc.)
Not all decisions are slow. But if you want fast decisions, create the environment for those decisions to be fast.
Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby’s new book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams is a fairly quick read, loaded with guidance and recommendations for teams that aren’t co-located apply the Agile Software Development principles. They even carve out specific instances of the principles as applied to distributed agile teams.
I recently read a pair of books that talk about project management shifting into product management - both of which seem to blame the woes of organizations on project management. One is Mik Kersten’s Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework, and the other is more of a work-in-process book (and free) #noprojects: A Culture of Continuous Value by Evan Leybourn and Shane Hastie.
Overall, these books present some interesting ideas on how to think of delivering value - whether it is in a project environment or not. And they present a few frustrations for me in that I don’t think the core problem is due to “projects.” I think it is deeper embedded into organizations that are so fractured that the flow of value has been lost. Lets get that righted, and project management AND product management work much better.
HBR this month has a great article on Too Many Projects by Rose Hollister and Michael D. Watkins. The essence of the article is that organizations have far too many projects, initiatives, efforts underway. And that they struggle to STOP that work - or not start it to begin with.
The latest DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) wrapped up last week in Las Vegas. Amongst the videos and tweets and blog posts that have come out of the event was a quick interview with Gene Kim on the Agile Amped podcast with Greg Bledsoe of SolutionsIQ.
This is a great list of the Internet-era ways of working from Tom Loosemore and public digital on what they mean by work in the era of the internet. I love coda to this list - “break any of these rules sooner than do anything barbaric.” There are also a number of items in here that make me step back and pause to check about my own assumptions.
My long-time blogging friend, Jim McGee, will be teaching a course on project management and has some thoughts on how to enhance the course this time around. His main question in Design projects before worrying about managing them is "We would do a better job at managing projects if we spent more time designing them first"?
Sanjeev Gupta of Realization gave the opening keynote on the second day of TOCICO. The talk was billed as "The Rising Importance of TOC" but ended up becoming "Solving the Projects Problem: It's not about buffers or behaviors" based on his experience with years and years of CCPM software and implementations.
Too high work-in-process (WIP) is dangerous for all sorts of reasons in almost any organization. It slows everything down like the molasses in winter. But simply saying “cut WIP” without understanding why it remains so high is a recipe for disaster. Let’s think about this a little.
It seems so easy to start with the tools before we think about why and what we are doing. The Agile Manifesto for Software Development provides a suggestion: People and Interactions over Processes and Tools.
I came across "Guest Blog: Finding Science and Success with Lean Principles in R&D" by Norbert Majerus of Goodyear on the Factory Physics website, and it describes the Factory Physics ideas as applied in new product development, and I thought it was a pretty good summary. This is also a lot of what we do with Theory of Constraints concepts applied in product development (and project management) arenas too.
Unlocking Innovation Productivity
Unlocking Innovation Productivity (Proven Strategies that Have Transformed Organizations for Profitable and Predictable New Product Growth Worldwide) by Mike Dalton is a guide to the challenges of product innovation and how to overcome them. He provides seven cumulative strategies to improve innovation, all based on Critical Chain Project Management and the underlying Theory of Constraints.
Quality, Involvement, Flow: The Systemic Organization by Domenico Lepore, Angela Montgomery and Giovanni Siepe. It's a good read for people interested in management and creating ever-flourishing organizations.
A video about multitasking told from the perspective of a design engineer who was lost in the world of multitasking - it took him four weeks to do a 2-4 day design task.