Frank Patrick

On Performer Over-Utilization

There are still too many project organizations that put emphasis on keeping everyone busy, due to the erroneous assumption that “an idle resource is a major waste.”

Someone on one of the discussion groups I participate in recently suggested one way to get managers to think about the error of these ways…

Ask “If your people are 90% utilized, how long would it take (without overtime) to recover from missing a day of work, or of running into Murphy’s Law to the tune of a day? How about 95%? 99%?” With a little bit of thought, the dangers to speed and throughput quickly become evident.

PM Links: Multi-project Management and Organizational Effectiveness

Links to last month’s 4-part series…

Part 1 - Organizations are multi-project systems

Part 2 - Organizational effectiveness is resource effectiveness

Part 3 - Managing the present and the future

Part 4 - It’s what you finish; not how much you start

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.

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Productivity…Not

It’s amazing how much stuff Tumblrers tag with “productivity” that have nothing to do with the topic.