pmStudent

Waste

Have you ever tried doing a value stream map of the processes you are engaged with personally as a project manager?

Bottlenecks

Meetings

Process for Process' Sake

Well?

Value

Do your stakeholders know?

How To Really Add Value

The Bean Counter

The Guru Who Won't Let Go

Do you manage your projects with the perspective of the full life cycle of the product(s) you are creating?

I’ll bet the answer is no. That’s what my answer is too. I think I fail at this as much as anyone.

Traditional project management practices have led us to focus on the short term impacts of scope, cost, and quality.
 

Initial Scope

This is probably the place we do best at identifying and trying to quantify the full life cycle costs of the product. There is at least a small section of the projects out there with a strong initiation phase that consider life beyond the final project milestone.

When we don’t, we can end up creating a product the customer is happy with today, but becomes the bane of their existence two years from now. Some examples of life cycle considerations:

• Maintainability of code
• Flexibility for future updates as technology progresses
• Ease of interfacing with other systems
• Sponsor changes - when your sponsor is replaced by someone else, does your product still add value to the business?
• Total cost of ownership

Change Control

When your project deals with a change request, what are the factors taken into account? Is it just a matter of how many hours or dollars it will take to implement the change?

Are you also estimating the impact in operations of the change? What life cycle considerations are you taking into account?
 

Documentation

When you decide to add another document into the mix or just on the initial number of documents required for your project, do you figure in the total impact for maintaining those documents across the entire product life cycle?
 

Code

If you aren’t doing automated software builds and automated unit testing of code, have you figured in the lifetime costs during development and in operations of that decision?

Have you figured in the risk of deploying code into operations that has only rudimentary testing procedures?
 

Processes

With all of the many processes that occur on your project, what’s the difference between their optimal state and the current state? Does saving an hour a day collectively across the project team because of a process improvement make a difference?

Have you taken into account how the design choices you make today will impact the processes required in operations? How much time are you saving or costing the users of your product?

Training

Are you short-sighted in thinking that training your project staff or spending time learning how to get continually better is something you can’t afford?

Perhaps your customer doesn’t want to pay for training, because project staff should come to the project fully trained. Do they realize that technology does not stand still?

How much money and time will you waste a year from now because you saved a much smaller amount today by not valuing the concept of a learning organization, a learning project team? Have you ever heard the expression “penny wise and pound foolish?”

So, what steps do you take on your projects to include the whole product life cycle in decision making?

Waste.

There is almost nothing I despise more.

Muda is a Japanese word meaning waste; activity that does not add value.

Why would you do such a thing?

Why?

“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.” ? Peter F. Drucker

Shoveling Muda

For a long time now corporate offices have been intent on efficiency, on productivity. We have been shoveling value littered with muda, in some cases mostly muda.

We have been focused on getting better at shoveling. More efficient shoveling is the only way to get more done, right?

In our current mindset, yes. If you aren’t able to change the content of what you are shoveling, you are doomed to go on shoveling a mix of what’s valuable and a great deal of what’s not. We bring in machines to automate the shoveling to make it go faster. Sometimes this means even more muda seeps into the mix, but we’re moving more tons per hour so it must be good.

And then we use our fancy tractor shovel to dump the mixture of half value, half muda on to our customers.

Self-Induced Muda

Now what if I tell you the muda involved in the above scenario is mostly self-induced? We’re actually creating the muda ourselves in many different ways.

We start with a pile of diamonds, but bring along some mud ourselves which we throw onto the pile of value. We tell ourselves the mud is necessary to keep the diamonds from moving around so much, or perhaps our supervisors require us to use mud. We see no useful purpose of the mud in this process, but we go along like good employees and do it the way it’s always been done.
Many times the mud had a purpose once, but now we are mining something entirely different than when the mud was introduced originally. However the old timers have always used mud, so we keep using it too.

Eliminating Muda

What if there was a way to go about delivering what the customers wanted, without the mud? Or at least without bringing along our own mud to the project?

Well, there is. It’s called Lean Thinking.

You can start by asking Why. And then ask Why again, and again. I’m not talking about the 5-Whys technique, that’s a different topic.

I mean every time you or your teams partake in an activity of any kind, ask these questions:

• Why are we doing this?
• What’s the value of doing this?
• Who gets value from doing this?

By the way, an answer like “upper management gets value because hey, they asked for it” is not good enough. Doing something just because somebody wants it isn’t good enough. Why do they want it? Are you sure they want it?

I’ve seen people produce reports by hand for years, and email it out to executives every day and then find out that no one ever, ever opened them. The reports were started at some time because a director asked for them. She probably used them for a week and got the information she needed, and then they became irrelevant.

But no one asked why. They just added it to the daily reporting deck, assuming it was valuable.

Well, it wasn’t. And as a result, some people’s entire jobs are almost entirely spent producing waste, when they could be producing value instead.

Think about the project(s) you are currently managing. What is their value to muda ratio?