Improving Project Flow Through Careful Dam Placement

  Innovation   Leadership   Strategy  

The goal of our project execution engine is to deliver value to the organization. But we often don’t manage them that way. We have learned in our factories to balance the capacity of the various steps in our processes and to limit the flow of jobs into the system. We see the inventory build-up and risk becoming obsolete before it can be consumed. Why, then, do we treat our projects differently? In this session we will talk about ways to meter the input to the project execution system to maximize the value of our output and dramatically reduce value lost to work that goes stale. The core of the system is having a list of prioritized projects ready to execute and pulling when there is capacity to start another one. In an ideal world this will mean that we never need to trade priorities of the running projects - we’ve only put as many into the system as we can execute efficiently in parallel. But the world isn’t ideal and there will still be conflicts between the running projects - though many fewer than before. When conflicts occur, we often prioritize ineffectually. We’ll talk about principles that can lead us to wiser decisions when choosing when and whether to give a project with a problem a boost.

Learning Outcomes:

• Identify how constraints and bottlenecks limit value delivery
• Explain how prioritizing projects and starting projects only when there is available capacity enhances value delivery
• Describe how to choose which running projects to accelerate when there are conflicts

The goal of our project execution engine is to deliver value to the organization. But we often don’t manage them that way. We have learned in our factories to balance the capacity of the various steps in our processes and to limit the flow of jobs into the system. We see the inventory build-up and risk becoming obsolete before it can be consumed. Why, then, do we treat our projects differently? In this session we will talk about ways to meter the input to the project execution system to maximize the value of our output and dramatically reduce value lost to work that goes stale. The core of the system is having a list of prioritized projects ready to execute and pulling when there is capacity to start another one. In an ideal world this will mean that we never need to trade priorities of the running projects - we’ve only put as many into the system as we can execute efficiently in parallel. But the world isn’t ideal and there will still be conflicts between the running projects - though many fewer than before. When conflicts occur, we often prioritize ineffectually. We’ll talk about principles that can lead us to wiser decisions when choosing when and whether to give a project with a problem a boost.