Many manufacturing industries have made great gains by utilizing lean principles in the factory. These principles, which have perhaps been most successfully applied in the Toyota Production System, can be summarized as follows: Read more »

The largest and most successful efforts to apply lean within engineering environments have occurred within the software engineering field. Within these projects, the most common approach has been to leverage the introduction of lean practices through adoption of compatible agile techniques. There is an understandable tension in this arena to strike the right balance between flexibility and discipline.

It is important to recognize that adoption of such new approaches, like any innovation, will take time, focus, and regular evangelism in order for any such change to stick. More importantly, there are critical project 'human factors' to consider when chosing to pursue lean techniques for a group. Any such effort should include: Read more »

Poor Winston Royce. The guy's big idea is vilified because of a popular misunderstanding of its meaning. The great irony of the Waterfall story is that Royce himself was trying to describe a more feedback-driven overlapping process.

But somehow, the Waterfall strawman itself became the reference model, presumably because it appealed to the authoritarian command-and-control mass-production paradigm of the American business culture of the 1970's. In a triumph of absurdity, that very culture was about to reach its nadir of quality, productivity, and profitability, as the dawn of an era of humiliating ass-kicking at the hands of the Japanese lean producers had just begun. Read more »

Often there is a need to organize many people, in a concentrated period of time, to accomplish highly important goals. In such situations, it is important to find just the right amount of project managment to achieve the following goals:

• motivate all teams to make the greatest progress possible in a fixed period of time
• organize the teams so that they can work independently, but share information important to all
• ensure that teams have what they need to accomplish their work effectively, and
• a means of pacing and keeping score

Too much project management, and the team feels micro-managed; too little, and the goals aren't accomplished, people can lose their focus, or the wrong goals may be achieved. The ideal is to establish a protocol which allows for easy customer goal-setting and prioritization, accountable and self-directed work-groups, and a visual means of demonstrating progress and highlighting help needed in accomplishing the goals. Read more »

Just got an email from PMI about their Europe, Middle East, Asia conference. With it was a ad for a "Quick Quiz" about Project Management

QuickQuiz
No matter how carefully I plan, my project reports often show the project to be over budget and behind schedule. My team works hard, so how can I stop this discouraging trend? Read more »