Today’s corporate world is characterized by increasing pressure
to deliver more but of uncompromising quality at a better rate. Increasing
efficiency of production using just in time production is not new followed by
build-on-demand concepts where value add to a customer takes on the focus in
agile software development. Regardless
of the industry and product built, how can today’s projects still deliver
increasing value maintaining the strict adherence to quality?
The fundamentals of iron-triangle of quality by managing the
levers of scope, schedule and cost is still present but timelines are requested
sometimes without clear scope, schedule then is accelerated to meet customer’s
demands, and still cost is allowed not to increase both in operational and capital
expenses. Keeping the focus on operational expenses, the question often
evolves: How to measure and enhance productivity?
I believe the basics of productivity are in clarity,
duration, and customer management. For projects that have somewhat known scope,
such as extending a product installation in a different client site that can leverage
past lessons learned, the clarity is not an issue. But, for new initiatives,
the product scope may be evolving, and this is where delivering to what is known
using agile concepts may be beneficial.
But the basics of duration management are differentiating
the type of hours that go into the project. Productivity losses come from two
types of hours that derail the project because productive time is taken out of
the duration because the “right” people are not on the “right” job at the “right”
time. These types of hours are as
follows.
- Non-Project Hours – Delivering no value to project but time for internal process enhances, functional department meetings, training, company meetings
- Non-Productive Hours – Time lost due to ambiguous work, lost work requests, unnecessary meetings, doing other’s work, assumption about roles, lack of accountability, etc.
The basics of project management differentiate duration
from estimate in addressing the first component which is often misunderstood.
Agile concepts address these by using ideal time to ensure that the story
points are properly incorporating enough time to develop value. But the second
part is the difficult one that the management needs to spend additional time in
ensuring that properly motivated and trained people are present, tools are
sufficient, and collaboration is cohesive.
In terms of the customer management (remember client is both
internal and external), the productivity goal should be to maximize hours
charged to a project, establish a baseline for products of similar nature and use
appropriate time entry/approval methods to evaluate against the baseline, forecast
and promote predictability of workload and hold everyone accountable. The principles
of stakeholder management are no wonder a newly added separate dimension in the
Project Management Book of Knowledge (2013).
In summary, productivity measure is rooted in people,
process, and tools that allow the job to be defined in adequate detail, breakdown
accountability by increasing collocation, introduce distribution tools for
effective collaboration, lead instead of managing the clients more effectively,
and use process as a key vehicle to integrate the whole in a virtual distributed
environment.
Thoughts?
References
Project Management Institute (2013). Project Management Book of Knowledge. Fifth Edition. New Town Square, PA: Project Management Institute.
