This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Friday, April 23, 2004
Rizzo on Speed and Profitability -- This looks like excellent news. One of my former co-workers and friend from the TOC community of practice, a thinker/writer/teacher/consultant well worth knowing (I wish he would start blogging), Tony Rizzo of The Product Development Institute and Spherical Angle, seems to be writing a book. At least there's a series of pages on his PDI website that refer to chapters 1 through 4 (as well as an empty link for chapter 5) of something called Speed and Profitability with the Six Sigma Enterprise. These chapters touch on similar notions of multi-project management that you've been reading here, but with Tony's unique ability to draw pictures in the mind. For example...
For a moment, think of each of your projects as a person. Imagine that you have fifty such people in one room of your facility, and you need to get all fifty into the adjacent room as fast as possible. There is one door connecting the two rooms. Now, imagine that each of these people is rewarded (or punished) on the basis of how fast he/she can make it into the next room. The ones who make it through quickly can expect to receive a reasonable reward. The ones who make it through a bit late get only their base salaries. The ones who make it through very late can expect to be encouraged to find employment elsewhere. Go ahead. Give the order to move, if you dare.
Commonsense tells us that a few of your fifty people will make it through the door immediately, until the crowd arrives. Then, some of them will try to make it through sideways. A few others may become creative and try to take the low route, only to cause others to trip and stumble. Soon, you'll see a mountain of bodies, many of which make it through the door very late, and perhaps with injuries. You may also see a few people standing back, waiting for the mob to clear.
Now, imagine that every few minutes you give the order to 20 or 30 more people to go through, while the mob continues to block the door. It's clear that nearly all will make it through very late. Many of these will suffer severe injuries. The ones who decide to stand back and wait for the mob to clear never go through, because the mob never clears.
This is probably a close description of the way your projects compete with each other, for shared resources. In our little scenario, the door is a shared resource. In reality, the shared resource may be a group of systems engineers or software developers or electrical engineers...
Nice visualization. Tony goes on in Chapter One to talk about unsynchronized multi-project environments and the resulting multi-tasking sickness that he refers to as the "dilution solution". I'll probably be getting deeper into the subsequent chapters as time goes on, but don't let that stop you from digging into Tony's stuff yourself. Now.
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