Execution discipline
Execution discipline
Useful planning by design
The longer a project takes, the more it will cost. More importantly, such delays typically bring increased levels of rework. As this rework must be absorbed by the team, they will become less efficient in delivering value to their customers. As they become less efficient, their products will thus become less affordable for their customers, and the number of customers may decrease. Unfortunately, with fewer customers, there may be fewer resources available to support the remaining customers. And with fewer resources, it may also take longer to deliver value to those customers. And you can see where this is going, right?
The only way out of this dilemna is to shorten the time and resources it takes to accomplish a benchmarked amount of work. A focus on the rate that such work can be performed is often the most important strategy for an organization to increase value to its customers, and differentiate it from competition. Streamlining your throughput can generally only be achieved by anticipating your customer's needs during planning, becoming more agile in performing the activities which you perform to design and develop your products, adopting an intense focus on disciplined execution, and proactively eliminating the constraints which cause delays and waste to occur. Read more »
Confronting uncertainty
We are surrounded by uncertainty. We rush to the airport, through unpredictable traffic, only to discover that the regularly scheduled flight we arrived early for has been delayed indefinitely. We watch last year's championship team fail to even make the playoffs this year. We invest in graduate school for our children, only to discover that they may be as likely to go bankrupt as get rich from the experience. Along the way, we may notice the frequency that we are impacted by uncertainty in time and outcomes. This insight may motivate us to attempt to answer a basic traveler's question: Should our journey or our destination be more important to us? Read more »
In praise of checklists
We live in a world of increasing complexity, where even the best of the best can struggle to accomplish all that is expected of them. This book describes one of the most basic, yet underutilized, techniques that is available to help in such situations: the checklist. Read more »
Attention to details
Throughout my career, I have observed that different people are attentive to and focused on different levels of detail, according to their personality, role, and experience. I mentally tend to put these people into one of two groups: "Roughly right" personality types, and "Precisely right" personality types (with apologies to Malcom Gladwell).
If you try to make a presentation about details to Roughly Right people, you will lose them. Yet if you don't provide such details to Precisely Right people, any commitment you seek, or plans you may offer may have little credibility with them.
Successful projects must thus provide a reliable means of engaging with both of these types of people, achieving their buy-in, and demonstrating the ability to translate from high-level concepts to corresponding details consistently. Linking this information requires enough time, resources, and attention to elaborate these details, and close the inevitable gaps of interpretation, as they arise. Read more »