ProjExc - Project Management Consultants

Lean Methodology

Following on from the popular Six Sigma post our manufacturing and supply chain specialist Clifford Hobbs, delves into the world of Lean Methodologies.  The whole article can be found on the ProjExc PM Portal.

Most of the tools and techniques that underpin Lean thinking originated in Japan in the 60's and 70's in companies such as Toyota. In the 80's and 90's they combined into what is now called Lean, and this broader concept of manufacturing has progressively been introduced to western manufacturers, and more recently to the service sector.

Lean is often described as an approach where waste is systematically eliminated from an organisation's processes. At its most basic level, it involves a systematic focus on rework, inventory, poor reliability, poor quality, and poor throughput throughout the organisation, and its supply chain.

A '... philosophy that shortens the time line between the customer order and the shipment by eliminating waste'.

Lean is the term that was introduced to describe the philosophy and practices under-pinning the Toyota Production System (TPS). TPS (developed in the 1970's) was a vastly superior system of manufacturing than that found in most western automotive manufacturers. Fundamentally TPS was challenging the foundations of mass production, by creating systems and an operating culture that enabled the company to manufacture a considerable variety of products, with high levels of efficiency and quality.

'To be a lean manufacturer requires a way of thinking that focuses on making the product flow through production without interruption, a pull system that cascades back from customer demand by replenishing what the next operation takes away at short intervals, and a culture in which everyone is striving continuously to improve.'

A key ingredient of the Lean approach is its emphasis on the creation of customer focused 'value chains' to help focus its improvement efforts.

Lean Manufacturing has helped companies to overcome some of the difficulties they experienced with introducing Just In Time. In some instances, JIT was seen as a blunt instrument for reducing working capital requirements. This objective was often very dangerous in practice as forced reductions of stock levels often caused major problems in businesses that lacked basic process dependability. This meant that companies de-stocked faster than they could improve, as a result serious customer service problems ensued.  JIT placed great pressure on supply chains. It is one thing to determine the capability of your own company but not so easy to ensure integrity of supply from a large and diverse supplier base. It soon became apparent that JIT required a partnership between supplier and customer.  Both of the examples above resulted in “pseudo” improvement programmes, as no attempt was made to approach the introduction of JIT in an organisation wide sense.

To be effective JIT needed waste reduction in all areas of an organisation, and in the supply chain. Lean Manufacturing approaches the issue of waste from a total process/total organisation perspective, and therefore addresses the need for capable processes, effective supply chains etc.

10 Useful Lists for Project Managers

I am getting close to publishing my favourite 10 lists to help project managers. It changes regularly, and there are lots to choose from. While we have a number of our own that we've built up at ProjExc, there are also some great lists out there as well. I recently spotted 2 on the techrepublic.com blogs by Tom Mochal which are worthy of mention:

10 Processes to Sharpen your PM Skills:

1. Define the project
2. Plan the work
3. Manage the workplan
4. Manage issues
5. Manage scope
6. Manage risks
7. Manage communication
8. Manage documentation
9. Manage quality
10. Manage metrics

Lists in themselves are not going to change the world, but as a quick checklist (backed up by some real skills and experience) they can be extremely useful to an individual juggling a number of balls. This 1^st list could well fall into this category.

The 2^nd list takes a different tack – I can see it has its uses when someone is being asked to perform the role of project manager as a bolt-on responsibility. I'm just not sure how many people would judge themselves honestly, particularly when a bonus may be dependent on taking on the task. Perhaps the best use of a list like this would be for an assigning line manager to consider the exhibited attributes of an individual before asking them to take on the PM role?

10 signs that you are not cut-out to be a project manager:

1. You are a poor communicator
2. You don't work well with people
3. You prefer the details
4. You don't like to manage people
5. You don't like to follow processes
6. You don't like to document things
7. You like to execute and not plan
8. You prefer to be an order taker
9. You are not organised
10. You think project management is overhead

Comments welcome as always!

Project Management – Must Have Skill for the Future?

Faster, better, cheaper. We have all experienced these being the drivers for businesses as they seek to improve operational efficiency. Our world is changing and shrinking, and so incremental improvement no longer guarantees competitive advantage.

In our experience, business leaders are looking for a new model for success by deploying step changes, creating a capability to implement the strategic imperatives of their organisation. Big business is now embodying a business model where a programme/project director is on the board, responsible for delivering change as it is needed. They oversee the choice and deployment of business changes that deliver competitive advantage consistently, quickly and accurately. As such Project and Programme Managers can be seen as the "Creator of Competitive Advantage" and bring their skills to the boardroom not just the backroom.

At ProjExc we do provide that resource on an interim basis (full or part-time) for businesses, but more importantly, we help organisations to build the capability up for themselves. That in our view is critical, because the competitive advantage of today is the basic competitive requirement of tomorrow.

Want some help for your organisation? Call or email us – you will find the details at www.projexc.com

Project Leadership Competence

Project Management is widely recognised as a critical factor in project success. ProjExc firmly believe that competence in project leadership is an essential part of a successful project manager's toolkit. We find that a successful Project Leader needs to be able to:

•    Develop the project vision
•    Build the project management team and lead the team through the key steps of the project management process
•    Lead the project team through the four stages of team development (Storming, Forming, Norming and Performing)
•    Demonstrate excellent communication skills: verbal, both one-on-one and with a group, and written skills.
•    Understand and use interpersonal relationship skills such as constructive feedback, conflict resolution, managing individual styles and personalities
•    Demonstrate high level facilitation skills
•    Be skilful at influencing, persuading and negotiating across the organization and removing obstacles for the team
•    Have the ability to accept criticism, feedback and input from others
•    Use skills in using tools and approaches such as brainstorming, organizing, decision making, project management, conflict resolution, and so on.
•    Sell and promote the project both within and often outside the organization.

Recognising this, Steve Harland our project leadership specialist has helped us to develop a number of project leadership development modules which can be structured around the specific needs of a business to provide a tailored project leadership programme. Typically these fall into 2 broad categories, i.e. Team Communication and Relationship Building, and Creating a High Performing Project Team.

IT Project Failures – Reduce them using PPM?

Michael Krigsman has written an interesting article on the ZDNET blog suggesting that while Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools can be useful, they are not the answer on their own. He suggests that from the perspective of IT failures, PPM brings discipline to four key areas:

• Standardizing the investment criteria used to evaluate project funding.
• Making project-related investments explicit.
• Prioritizing projects across the enterprise.
• Providing a way to measure project success, relative to organizational investment policies.

Six Sigma

This post has been prepared by the ProjExc Manufacturing and Supply Chain Specialist, Clifford Hobbs. It is an excerpt from a more detailed review of Six Sigma and Lean methodologies to improve business performance, which no doubt come to light in future posts on the ProjExc Blog.

Introduction - Six Sigma is a highly customer focused improvement tool that is underpinned by a philosophy of rigorous measurement.

'a comprehensive and flexible system for achieving, sustaining and maximising business success. Six Sigma is uniquely driven by close understanding of customer needs, disciplined use of facts, data and statistical analysis and diligent attention to managing, improving and reinventing business processes'

The term 'sigma' means "Standard Deviation". Standard Deviation measures the variability in a given distribution or population of events and can therefore be applied to a process.

Motorola developed Six Sigma in the mid 80's. It was then successfully championed by Jack Welsh at General Electric in the 1990's. Their success stories have prompted many western (and in particular USA) manufacturers to adopt Six Sigma. More recently companies in the service sector have started to introduce and adopt Six Sigma practices.

There are many aspects of Six Sigma that are similar to Total Quality Management (TQM), which preceded Six Sigma and in many peoples view has now been superseded by Six Sigma.

Overview - Sigma can be translated into the number of defects per million "events".

Six sigma represents 3.4 defects per million events and is regarded as the ultimate goal for process performance - as close to perfection as is practicable.

This following gives the sigma to defect conversion ratio:

Six Sigma = 3.4 Defects per Million
Five Sigma = 230 Defects per Million
Four Sigma = 6210 Defects per Million
Three Sigma = 66,800 Defects per Million
Two Sigma = 308,000 Defects per Million
One Sigma = 690,000 Defects per Million.

The ultimate goal of a Six Sigma programme is to reduce the number of defects per million opportunities to 3.4 - the equivalent of a 99.997% quality level.

Methodologies - There are different approaches to implementing Six Sigma although the main principles are as follows:

1.    Identify core processes and key customers
2.    Define customer requirements
3.    Measure current performance
4.    Prioritise, analyse and implement improvements
5.    Expand and integrate the Six Sigma system.

The Six Sigma approach is strongly focused on ensuring effective processes from the perspective of the final customer. Critical processes are identified as part of the analysis of customer requirements, and statistical methods are applied to measure the variation of these processes against customer/market determined "tolerances". Techniques such as SPC and Design of Experiments are used to identify the root cause of poor process capability or to monitor processes in real time.

Improvement cycles are core to Six Sigma. An example being as follows:

1.    Prioritise areas of improvement
2.    Define processes that contribute to problems
3.    Measure the capability of each process
4.    Analyse the data
5.    Control process variability
6.    Standardise methods
7.    Integrate methods into design/process cycle

There are many statistical tools that are used within Six Sigma including: Quality Function Deployment, Run Charts, Pareto Charts, Histograms, Fishbone diagrams, Process Mapping, Design of Experiments, Project Definition, F-tests, Chi-Square Tests, Multivariate Studies, Fractional Factorials and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis.

Summary - Six Sigma pulls together well established operational tools and techniques that have been around for a number of decades. Over the last few years it has become increasingly popular with larger organisations and non manufacturing organisations. This is because it is very customer focused and has a strong emphasis on measurement and delivery of quantifiable benefit.

However, introducing Six Sigma is a high profile company-wide event and therefore the consequence of failure is significant. It is very 'resource hungry', and as with any major change initiative, will require total commitment from across the organisation and the infrastructure and organisation to support it.

The focus of much of the approach is on advanced statistical techniques, which can be complex and inappropriate for the majority of organisations, where the real challenge is to build simple and robust foundations for improvement. The advanced tools have their uses within an organisation that has already put in place the basic foundations of operational good practice, but their premature introduction in the wrong circumstances can place Six Sigma in the 'next failed initiative' category, making further improvement even harder.

Success in a Six Sigma program is subject to the same influences as many other change programmes i.e. leadership commitment to the program, involvement of staff at an early stage, integration of the change programme into the business practices of the organisation, good change management skills, and a clear focus on the end goal. Six Sigma Programmes (and Lean Programmes) are usually total company initiatives involving significant roll out costs, training and dedicated resource.

Effective Six Sigma programmes build on organisational capability and culture such as Continuous Improvement, Best Practice, team working and a measurement focus.

Six Sigma should not be viewed as something new or revolutionary and distinct from the day to day disciplines that companies should build in to their operations.

Comments on this posting from ProjExc Manufacturing and Supply Chain Specialist, Clifford Hobbs, are welcomed on the blog, or if you would like to discuss the subject some more, then contact details can be found on the ProjExc corporate website.

Looking for Project Management Tools – where do you start?

At ProjExc we are often asked to provide Project Management tools. This is one question where we answer "no", but for a good reason.

There is no, "one size fits all solution". We believe that it is crucial to get the process right for the organisation first, and then to go to the market for the best solution, which will be different depending on needs, legacy systems, budget, etc. Each time we trawl the market there is a huge array of tools out there, and they are all evolving quickly, with new entrants joining the market place on what feels like a daily basis. We continue to maintain our position of independence from the tool suppliers, and support our client in the specification, procurement and integration process for appropriate tools, as they need.

There is a helpful resource available on the excellent website of the PM Today Magazine. If you're seeking some project management software for the 1^st time, this could be a good place to start, but be aware that there are many other excellent tools out there which are not included in the list. We're compiling a list of our own at the moment, which we hope to add to the ProjExc PM Portal website soon.

Online Project Management Tools

A number of clients have asked us recently for help in sourcing and adapting online project management functionality, in support of their project process. A little research has thrown up a plethora of tools which work at a broad range of levels. They include the likes of Comindwork, OPMCreator which offer various "teamroom" type functionality. We'd love to find an online (decent) gantt chart tool for the occasional user, so if any reader can recommend anything we'd love to hear from you, either as a blog comment or via the many routes to ProjExc listed on our website. Of course we will be keeping our eyes peeled at the forthcoming Project Challenge event, so watch this space.

10 Tips for Great IT Managers

I recently read a great article on ZDNET providing advice to IT managers challenged by the common problem of reaction overtaking their proaction.  The advice in summary provides 10 great tips:

1. Spend time (and money) developing your people
2. Get to know what your staff really does
3. Don't do it for them
4. Know the business and make sure it knows you
5. Treat communication as a busy, fast-moving, two-way street
6. Encourage everyone to work as a team
7. Provide feedback regularly and let employees know what you want
8. Hire well
9. Understand best IT practices, but don't just make them buzz words
10. Be a good project manager

The advice to be a good project manager is:
"Did your last project suffer scope creep? Most projects, particularly IT ones, don't fail because the project itself was bad. Most failures are a result of weak project management. If you haven't had any formal project management training, find and invest in a good program.  Don't fall into the trap of thinking that simply by having regular meetings, you are managing the project. And since IT usually has more projects than people, be sure to train lead workers with basic project management skills so you can delegate specific aspects of the project or even entire projects to their control."

This is good advice, but only part of the story.  In our experience at ProjExc, it is critically important that those managing projects (especially if it is not their main responsibility) are given the support of appropriate methods/processes and systems which match the methods, otherwise the investment in the training can be wasted or worse.

BlogCatalog Listing

This blog has just been submitted to BlogCatalog which appears to be a useful source of information on blogging and blogs. Take a look at:

http://www.blogcatalog.com/directory/business

We'd be glad to hear from you if you can suggest anywhere else we should be registering our blog. If you have a suggestion please post details in a comment.