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.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Between the Boxes --
"The sagacious reader who is capable of reading between these lines what does not stand written in them, but is nevertheless implied, will be able to form some conception." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 1749-1832 (via Bartleby)
I've been thinking more again about the arrows between the boxes. Whether we're talking about projects or processes, it's not so much the content of the boxes, but the arrows between them that actually define the effort and deliver the results.
The handoffs that those arrows represent are a major source of fumbles and miscommunication and as such, should be the primary focus of the project manager or process owner. The people performing the stuff in the boxes (which by the way, don't forget, have their own set of smaller boxes and arrows) own those boxes and the methods used to do what they do.
However, the project manager and process owner need to solicit from them what they need to do what they need to do to support the larger effort. It's the identification of these dependencies and their translation into inputs and outputs in the forms of the arrows that link the boxes that constitute the definition of the project or process in question. Interim tasks and subprocesses are only necessary to create the conditions necessary to let loose an arrow allowing the flow to continue. Even more than bobbling handoffs that we plan for, it's the failure to identify necessary inputs and where they'll come from that cause a lion's share of blocked flow within a project or process.
There's usually a lot more performers in an effort than there are project or process managers, so the boxes, tasks, and subprocesses that are identified usually get a lot of attention. More attention often needs to be aimed at the arrows, handoffs, and deliverables. Most of my project plans have quite verbose task descriptions, often necessary to help clarify and define the outputs of the task in order to fully define completion for the performer of the work. I wish I could put information on the arrows, defining the actual deliverables, in PM software like can be done in software designed to map processes.
Goethe says that the meaning is "between the lines." In project and process management, at least we have the arrows in our network diagrams or process maps to help make those connections, but it's still in the purview of those involved to be aware of the white space and the need to understand more of what's between them - the missing arrows.
View Frank Patrick's profile
