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.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Multi-Project Management and Organizational Effectiveness VII - Managing the Present and the Future --
Once an organization understands the constraints associated with it’s ability to deliver projects, whether for customer-driven deliverables or for internal process improvements, it has the basis to not only avoid overloading its current capacity and capability, but also to smoothly growing the capability to take on more work in the future, whether next month, later this week, or next year.
Next month - “How much should we take on?" - Gating project launches. At the border of portfolio management and project management lies pipeline management. Nothing will bog down a project delivery system faster than the premature push of projects into a system that can’t really handle them.
Once the portfolio management or sales acceptance process determines the relative ordering of projects, the process for synchronizing project launches to constraint capacity is a simple matter of staggering them at the point of use of the constraint. Once it is known when the constraint can take on a new project, it’s a simple matter of placing it there in the calendar, perhaps with a bit of buffer to avoid cross project impacts at the constraint, and examining the resulting schedule to determine where it’s appropriate to start the upstream activities.
If project launches are staggered in this manner, then the constraining resource will not be overloaded. And if the constraining resource is not overloaded, then the other non-constraining resources will also, by definition, not be overloaded, thereby reducing pressures to multi-task and simplifying the question of priorities when the occasional need to choose which task to work comes up.
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