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Making Good Management Decisions 1st Edition
Making Good Management Decisions 1st Edition
(Chapter 35 of Theory of Constraints Handbook)
Advanced Multi-Project Management, provides the full details for driving more projects to completion in far less time.
Simplifying Innovation: Doubling speed to market and new product profits – with your existing resources…….
Questions and more occurred too late. The world moves faster than we can translate.
“If it’s urgent, it is probably too late.”
Urgency is the consequence of Ignoring feedback until it’s too late to alter the outcome.
Dashboards display indicators that focus attention on areas requiring intervention. This is especially critical in CCPM, where Task Safety has been removed. Removing safety from tasks and cumulating the safety for all tasks into buffers provides a tool that gives timely signals to management when attention is needed.
Success is a choice: If the task updates are delayed, the indicators and decisions are outdated. A dashboard flashing Red should not be ignored. And Black is beyond Red, which probably means additional Time and Money to recover.
The Project WIP Chart for Started Projects – the accumulated Durations of In-progress and Un-started Tasks provide a visual story.
Started Projects – the accumulated Durations of In-progress and Un-started Tasks provide a visual story.
Everything looks in order on this Project – except for an accumulating pile of future WIP waiting at the Finish. No other indicator displays this prediction.
Unattended early delays accumulate and have consequences later in the project life cycle. The discipline of task updating should be practiced from the beginning of a project timeline.
Ignoring frequent Task Updating means the decision intelligence is false. Therefore the decisions made are equally false. Deadlines and Time demand that we make decisions, so we wing it, making stuff up because our intuition knows the data is incorrect.
This behavior affects everyone’s perception of the status and information of a project across the entire organization.
Senior Level: What Executives believe will happen.
Management Level: What Managers believe is happening.
Supervisor Level: What is most likely happening (ask the Team Leader).
Information Intelligence Level: What the indicators prove is happening.
One cannot over-emphasize the cause-and-effect relationship between Frequent Task Updating and Reliable Project Management Success.
Intelligent decisions demand that accurate information is at the source.
A poor assumption: We have a “long” project timeline. Therefore, we should not be concerned with early slippage as there is plenty of run time left.
Murphy PM 101: In Project Management, ignored slippages accumulate and emerge at the worst possible time.
We face a management process of “winging it” based on outdated information or applying real-time intelligence to communicate and guide the team’s decisions.
Best Practice: CCPM method requires the discipline of Frequent Task Updating.
This means daily Task Remaining Duration updates, along with Notes and Reason Codes, to establish a Process of Ongoing Improvement. Daily task updates can only be valid by checking with the people performing the tasks; too often, updates are made without verification just for reporting sake. Poor reporting can become another source of misinformation
To find out how Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) will Transform your Portfolio of Projects to over 90% On-time, within Budget, and Scope, vemail CustomerSupport@Exepron.com
The Allocation of Resources to accomplish a Portfolio Workload. When managing a Project or a Project Portfolio, it’s critical to correctly distribute resources to accomplish all Project Objectives i a Portfolio of Projects in the shortest and most efficient manner possible. Without proper resource allocation, projects expense and total duration can quickly get out of control. During the Execution phase, information and reports will not provide meaningful intelligence for any realistic decision-
The Project Management Office (PMO) remains relevant for effective project management (PM), even if you are running a Manufacturing schedule, Project Portfolio, or Agile and LEAN methodology. PMOs should be a vital key to coordinating the required collaboration across projects large and small, single mega projects, or a portfolio of projects. The PMO continues to have broad utility, even as the PMO is becoming more decentralized and specialized.
Leadership is often frustrated by Strategies missing their mark and Initiatives having low completion rates. How to improve your 90 Day Initiative Success rate.
The probability of Success increases with solid preparation. This is absolutely true in Project Management. Incomplete, incorrect or too detailed Project Networks simply cannot produce a good result. Read this foundational white paper on how to build good project networks. Well known authors Kathy Austin and Gerry Kendall have codified a “Best Practice” for Project Managers. Critical Chain projects are particularly successful starting with a great network.
Why does Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) ignore cost? The three pillars of project management as every project manager is well aware are schedule, scope and cost. They are necessary conditions and the success of a project’s execution will be measured against the planned vis-à-vis actual performance of these three criterions. In a specific project they may be co-equals or one may be more heavily weighted than the others, but make no mistake they are all important and they are all evaluat
I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that Critical Chain is a paradigm shift in project management practices. What I mean by “paradigm shift” is that the required change in project behavior is so radical that you cannot use your experience to predict the outcome. By Gerald I. Kendall, TOC International.
The development of project management thinking and new techniques has, at times, been slow and deliberate. Read how to break the pattern by adding the 3rd dimension to critical chain project management. By Daniel P. Walsh
TOC International’s Gerald Kendall explains how the use of Exepron’s Critical Chain Project Management software is being used to overcome the behaviors that hinder “Strategy Execution”. In addition, he describes how to remove perpetual delays in execution and how the use of Exepron is “like having a personal assistant with us every single day.”
TOC, Theory of Constraints, is very clear on guidance with respect to WIP: Excess WIP is bad. Little’s Law demonstrates the correlation between the amount of WIP and the lead time to produce a product or a deliverable. WIP should not exceed the capacity of the available resources. So, what is WIP?
This article focuses on the idea of building smaller projects based within a larger project versus having a large project with many variables that can be difficult to comprehend and manage. Learn more about managing complex projects by reading the entire article.
This paper and presentation discusses the application of Critical Chain methodology to master scheduling for repair of complex military aircraft, a task considered by some to be a daunting challenge within even a sophisticated project management system. The application of Critical Chain to master scheduling of other complex industrial sectors would appear to offer similar benefits as apparrent in this case study in the re-manufacturing sector.
This chronicles implementing improvement in a privately owned shipyard in 1998 that is undergoing significant turmoil. On the one hand it is striving to maintain its reputation for delivering a high quality product on time while controlling costs.
Written by John L. Thompson, this white paper reviews the differences between Traditional Project Management methods and software versus the Next Generation in Advanced real-time Project Management. Understand why Projects do not meet their due dates, the Critical Chain Solution to this problem, the Results and the Financial Value generated by completing more projects without increasing costs!
Written by Eli Schragenheim and Daniel Walsh, this paper discusses the differences between manufacturing versus completing projects. As stated in the article, “Planning the manufacturing floor is clearly distinct from running a project.” This article will help to define what the differences are, and why there are different approaches for projects versus manufacturing.
Offshore wind energy is rapidly gaining momentum in the United States as a viable renewable energy source. The industry has seen significant investment in recent years, with several large-scale projects currently in development. According to the American Wind Energy Association, the US offshore wind energy pipeline reached a record 35,324 megawatts (MW) at the end of 2021, up from 27,664 MW at the end of 2020. This growth represents a more than 27% increase in the offshore wind project pipeline in just one year, indicating a strong and growing interest in offshore wind investment.
Several states, such as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Texas, and Louisiana, have set aggressive renewable energy goals, including significant offshore wind targets, which drive investment in the industry. In addition, the Biden administration has prioritized offshore wind development, committing to deploying 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030. To support this target, the administration has pledged to invest $17 billion in federal funding to support the construction and operation of offshore wind farms over the next decade. With significant public and private investment, the US offshore wind industry is poised to proliferate in the coming years and become an increasingly important renewable energy source for the country.
Professor Powell announced the assignment with a sly smile. Read an Ops textbook over spring break? But there were slopes to ski, beaches to lounge on, internship interviews to bomb. I pictured myself sipping a fizzy tropical drink, drawing fl ow charts in the sand with a little paper umbrella (a visualization made all the more painful when I realized my road trip through Delaware and New Jersey would not likely include a Caribbean detour)
First and foremost Theory of Constraints (TOC) must be viewed as an overarching management approach uniquely providing an organization’s leadership the ability of focusing on what is best for the enterprise rather than the individual pieces. One must view an organization as a system, therefore all organizations have two fundamental traits; the individual parts do not act in isolation, indeed they are all interconnected and variability is always present.
Project Teams are expected to complete Projects before or on the committed due date, within budget and without compromise to the original specification. History shows a pattern of project underperformance, with most projects not meeting one or more of these expectations.
If your need is rapid improvement for a complex scheduling environment, your projects experience high uncertainty, and if late delivery has severe consequences, then evaluate Exepron.
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