The business ability to meet their objectives on time, budget and quality can bring many benefits and competitive advantage. But some... never learn!
They make mistakes, forget about them and make them over and over again. But... there are also world-winning performers who set the standard for performance.
Generally it will be defined by their project management maturity. There is always room for improvements. Moving from chaos to well structured processes required a great level of discipline and well structured processes. Eventually, the procedures can be discarded and a business develops tailored system to each individual project.
Generally the low level organisations (flat-liners) have little processes and discipline and poor performance as a result. The next level of organisations (improvers) would have some processes established achieving acceptable performance.
The third group are the (wannabes) who adopted processes based on best best practice. And the last level (world-class performers) have well mapped processes with learning evident between the projects and exceeding the objectives.
Performance indicators
Project management discipline adopted KPIs to measure project performance. This could be a percent of project delivered, budget conformance or customer-satisfaction. The very basic data is being evaluated, including financial evaluation. But ,project managers should assess the processes behind the figures. Mapping processes provides more useful information on how constraints are handled and problems addressed.
Productivity is generally measured by output achieved per unit for input resources. This might be associated with units per hour or output of production lines. But these are generally used in production environments. In project management it is very difficult to measure project productivity. A better idea might be to measure engineering performance but generally it would focus on hours and not quality.
Achievement of "right first time" is a good place to start on project performance management.
It measures the number of engineering changes requests or engineering problems. Therefore changes made as well as issues reported would be a good indicators.
Academics developed number of project performance indicators:
- financial ( are we up to budget?),
- customer perspective (satisfaction)
- internal business perspective
- innovation and learning perspective
Generally organisations will want to improve their scores on the above criteria. The improvements might be made through process improvements or quality training for employees. Generally the % improvements are used.
Generally, world-class organisations will achieve better performance in quality and productivity.
Lean
Very often lean principles can be applied in project management.
We are being progressive in terms of:
- Structure - that is flexible rather than rigid to address changes in customer requirements.
- Optimisation of project flows.
- Open communications with flat organisational structures rather than hierarchical ( chain-of-command).
- Trust and agreement with stakeholders, including suppliers.
- Skilled workforce that allows for flexibility.
- Education and training is a significant part of work.
There is one helpful lean principle: "If it doesn't add value, it is a waste".
This principle can easily be applied in project management. This can be applied, for example to processing information and how it is generated. Waste can also be generated when focusing on local issues rather than global issues and business objectives.
There are seven types of waste in mean management:
do not carry our activities over and beyond to what is required by customer in terms of quantity and quality.
eliminate waiting time in projects and information.
the movement of people, things and information is generally non-value added process.
eliminate need for processes that require further processing.
eliminate waste associated with building up inventory that involve additional costs of storing and processing.
avoiding not having materials or information on hand when needed and having to go and find them.
continuously strive to reduce waste due to errors and mistakes.
In project management, therefore:
- tasks should be simplified - procedures uncomplicated and not open to interpretation
- tasks should be combined to avoid transfer time
- any non-value added tasks should be eliminated, such as bureaucracy that take a lot of manager's time.
Agile
Agile approach would often be used in software development environments. Some of the principles include:
- the work is broken into sprints (generally around 4 weeks long) that keep the job short and concise.
- the output of each sprint is to be the software release and tested by the end-user.
- intensity is maintained by daily meetings or scrums (15-20 minutes meetings) which focus on removing barriers of the process.
- programming is paired up in pairs which proves to reduce programming errors, one person working another watching and swapping over.
- the testing protocols are written before the software.
Organisations like Microsoft adopted agile approached across their processes. In project management, some of the concepts (regular meetings, focused working) can get us to the "right first time" objective. There is little applicability of the agile approach, however, outside the IT industry.
Change
It is said that there are three main pillars of change:
- Strategy deployment (adoption of change policy, prioritisation of change, internal and external drivers for change) this involves the processes on how the business adopts change, coherence with business objectives is also vital.
- Managed knowledge - organisational learning, structure for sources of change ideas, systematic evaluation of new ideas.
- Implementation - measuring an impact of change, implementation methodology
The three pillars must be present for a change to be successful. Any change in itself is a project that many companies can benefit from.
For the aspiring project manager there are significant benefits of being aware of all the above factors. the goal of every project manager should be to continuously improve our processes.
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