Frank Patrick

PM Post: Relay Race, Interrupted

Quite a while ago, back in my independent consulting days, a discussion list I participated in carried a thread about how to engrain and assure appropriate behaviors in management of a project organization. Around the same time, the following had come into my inbox from a different source, and for some reason I thought of that discussion…

There’s a story about an MIT student who spent an entire summer going to the Harvard football field every day wearing a black and white striped shirt, walking up and down the field for ten or fifteen minutes throwing birdseed, blowing a whistle, and then walking off the field. At the end of the summer, it came time for the first Harvard home football game, the referee walked onto the field and blew the whistle, and the game had to be delayed for a half hour to wait for the birds to get off of the field.

A clear demonstration of the power of consistently walking the “squawk.”

There’s also a story from personal experience with a client that shows how deviating from the promised behaviors can get management into trouble. It happened in an implementation of Critical Chain-based multi-project management at a telecom equipment firm building systems of integrated hardware and software. Critical Chain training was given to management first (since they had to have the ability to “walk the talk” from the get-go), and then to members of the project teams as the projects were revisited for completeness of plan and alignment with the multi-project processes.

One of the key concepts demonstrated by games and simulations in the training is the idea of the “project as relay race,” as opposed to the usually date-driven metaphor of a train. The team picked up on this idea with a vengeance — so much so that they went out to the local sporting goods store and bought a set of relay race batons, which were painted brightly, and attached to a rope so that they could be hung on a doorknob or on the entrance to a cubicle.

Read More

PM Post: A Relay Race, not a Train Schedule

Most projects are managed by carefully watching the calendar, comparing where we are today against some baseline schedule. That schedule typically consists of a series of start and due dates for consecutive tasks, with due dates of predecessors matching start dates of successors. Like a train schedule, if a task arrives at its completion on or before its due date, that portion of the project is considered to be “on track.” Successor resources plan other work and their availability around those dates. If the predecessor is finished early, the successor resource may not be available to pick up the handoff. Even if the resource is available, there is commonly little or no urgency for the successor to start (or to focus on it exclusively), since we’re “ahead of schedule,” and that resource will typically tend to other priorities.

The problem with this common practice is that while it is important for trains to arrive at and depart from their stations (their milestones) at appointed times, project value is more often tied to the absolute speed from beginning to end. The sooner the entire project is completed; the sooner project benefits can be accrued. A more appropriate metaphor to guide projects is a relay race, in which resources are encouraged to pick up the input handoff as soon as it is available, “run with it” in a full, focused, sustainable level of effort, and hand off the output as soon as it is complete.

Read More