Execution discipline
Execution discipline
Structuring collaborative efforts
As projects progress through a transition from lust to dust, uncertainty is progressively reduced over time. The responsibility to manage this risk is shared between an organization's leadership and the project team members. The project team should manage the risk factors that could disrupt satisfying the needs of all stakeholders with the product that is planned to be developed. In parallel, the organization's leadership should manage the risks which are external to the project and impact multiple projects across the organization's project, product, and service portfolio. A delicate balancing act is necessary in performing this risk management, since it is easy for leadership to become too focused in managing the details of individual projects, at the expense of attention to necessary structural impediments. If leadership is not sufficiently involved, projects may not have adequate support among decision-makers, and resources may be wasted due to poor execution, or consume resources that would be more appropriately used elsewhere. Read more »
Attention to details
Throughout my career, I have observed that different people are often attentive to and focused on different levels of conceptual refinement. These perspectives vary according to their roles on a project, their individual personalities, and their experience. I have tended to mentally categorize these individuals into one of two different types of individuals at the top and bottom of this granularity perception universe: a "Roughly right" personality type, and a "Precisely right" type. Read more »
Wise decision-making
Decision-making requires us to understand a situation and accurately weigh the alternatives which present themselves to us. To gain such an understanding, we need to do far more than just collect facts and information. Our understanding is subject to all kinds of flaws and biases in our perceptions of reality. As John Sterman describes it:
Decision-making processes are also unfortunately prone to political influences and increasing bureaucracy. These factors can combine to delay conclusions and dilute our focus on achieving desirable outcomes. Fred Brooks describes these distractions as follows:
In How Decision-making can be improved, authors Milkman, Chugh, and Bazerman summarize the primary challenges of decision-makers: Read more »
Visual empowerment
A kanban is a visual signal card used to manage flow through a system. The primary purpose of a Kanban system is to provide visual indicators to highlight undesirable conditions that manifest themselves in development or operations. Visual controls should be used to help achieve important business outcomes, and are a means to such ends, not an end unto themselves.
The pattern recognition which these cues help facilitate enable individuals to act on them quickly and with a minimum of overhead. Through this empowerment, kanban' achieve smooth flow, as opposed to stop and go behavior. When such visual controls are adopted by a community, they can have a profoundly catalytic effect on learning and improvement within an organization.
In the book Kanban, David Anderson describes the essence of a kanban board: Read more »
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? Read more »