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.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Multi-Project Management and Organizational Effectiveness X -- It’s not how much you start. It’s how much you finish. Too many organizations act as if by packing the pipeline and keeping everyone heavily loaded with work, a combination of filled queues and busy resources will result in rapid and reliable project completions. Instead, projects bump into one another, adding delays usually unanticipated in individual project promises, and resources burn out jumping between unfinished tasks that then further delay task handoffs and project completions.
Suggested exercise: Survey some of your project participants. Ask them how many different tasks they currently have open? How many different project reviews do they attend each week? Ask them how long they expect their current collection of tasks to take to complete? Then ask them if they set aside most tasks and just picked one and finished it as if it was the only thing they had to do, then another, then another... when would the individual tasks and the total collection be complete? How much less time would it take them to complete them all if they focused on one at a time?
Constraint Management suggests instead that projects only be launched at a rate that can be handled by the organizational system, and as its surrogate, by the system’s constraining resource. This constraint is easily identified as a heavily used resource, skill, or facility common to most projects in the portfolio. Once the pipeline of projects quickly settles down to stability through such an approach, it becomes a matter of systematic constraint management to grow the capacity and capability of the organization to meet strategic needs.
Suggested exercise: Consider your organization. Even if it is in a chaotic state in which every resource feels overloaded, ask around where, if you could double the capacity of one and only one resource, skill, or facility, it would be most beneficial for the organization in terms of helping more projects move to completion quicker? In most organizations, it usually quickly narrows down to a consensus on one or two candidates. Those are your initial candidates for designation as project pipeline constraint.
Every organization needs to consider how it manages the collection of projects it requires to sustain itself. Whether the business is based on delivering project work or process improvements require attention from a limited pool of players, or if the business depends on a steady flow of new product development, maximizing throughput of completed projects is critical to organizational effectiveness.
Suggested exercise: Consider your organization. Determine how many people are involved in project work. Is this project work revenue enhancing or primarily supporting process improvements? (Don’t forget your IT department.) What would be the impact if you could finish most projects in 25% to 50% less time than you typically do today by eliminating multi-tasking? More importantly, what would be the impact if you could double or even triple the number of projects completed in a year by synchronizing project launches with your constraint?
In summary, it’s not about how many projects you launch. It’s not about how busy everyone is. It’s not about success with one major project that’s got everyone’s attention anyhow. It’s about how many projects you finish in a period of time. It’s about finishing many projects rapidly and reliably. It’s about maximizing the throughput of your project pipeline, and the key to moving more through a pipeline is not in by forcing too much through it, creating turbulence, leaks, and spills. It’s about understanding the bottlenecks and constraints, rationally loading them, and systematically growing their capacity.
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