This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
"'If costs in Bangalore are about 1/4 those in Seattle then all you need to do is improve productivity 4 fold to compete.' One of the developers was stunned by this. He is a hard working, smart, diligent guy. How could he possible work 4 times harder? Good question.
"I replied that if you have an initial quality metric of 3 bugs per Feature and you cut that to say 0.5 bugs per Feature by spending 15% of your effort on design reviews, code reviews and unit tests, then you will increase productivity 4 fold - easy! And this is just scraping the surface of what is possible. Eliminate all sorts of waste such as - queuing and waiting time, conflicts, use automation on repeating process and non-value-added activities such as reporting, improve analysis techniques to focus just enough and no more, improve flow in the value chain and reduce work-in-process. With all of these things it is possible to see up to 10 fold improvements with initially immature teams."
Actually one of the former units of Lucent -- one of the units with enough value to attract a buyer at a good price a while ago -- tripled their project throughput by with no significant increase in resources by implementing effective (TOC/Critical Chain-based) multi-project management in the first year, before any further continuous improvement efforts, which were now feasible due to the lessened overload stress.
Two of the items that David mentions -- queuing and waiting time, and conflicts -- are huge capacity killers in most project environments. Their major sources -- multi-tasking, Parkinson's Law, mismanagement of resource expectations, ineffective pipeline management, and unclear and conflicting priorities are things that management can deal with to make outsourcing an unattractive alternative. Add in a bit of common sense at the technical task level, and David's prescription of a 4-fold improvement in productivity is well within reach even of relatively mature team.
It's not a matter of how to do it. That has been demonstrated in a range of environments.
It's a matter of the will to question what hasn't really worked to date...
...before the people to whom you outsource beat you to it.
posted by Frank - Permanent Link -
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