Management Blind Spots That Cause Missed Delivery Dates

Blind Spot 2 – Death by Meeting

Ugh. Another project meeting. We’ve all been there, annoyed when our reminder goes off (if you still use them!) to tell us it’s our 8th meeting of the day. We’re annoyed because there are so many meetings, and they never seem to get anywhere. The same stories, the same excuses. Well, at the close of the meeting, at least we know where we are. Or do we?

There are many ways to make meetings more productive, but I won’t bore you with them. Instead, I’ll pose a question: why have them at all? You could also ask why there are so many of them.

Death by meeting to manage a project is a symptom. It’s a symptom of an out-of-control project management process. Most project team members don’t even see frequent meetings as a problem; they are simply a fact of life. The reality of the situation is hidden.

Meetings themselves are not the problem. They serve a useful function by forcing communication of important information. They synchronize resources, allocate activities, and highlight the project’s delays. At least, that’s what they’re supposed to do. We see other things happening in project meetings: status updates, turf defense, defending original commitments, and giving reasons why things haven’t worked out – a laundry list of missed expectations. Projects are executed looking through the rearview mirror.

With this kind of management, the project team never gets a clear view of what’s ahead or what action to take.

There are two (main) reasons for this kind of death:

1. The project team does not know the project’s true status (where we are and where to go).
2. The project team’s measurements are not aligned.

I’ve written a lot about the ViewPoint visual project management approach, which essentially solves the first problem. The approach creates a shorthand (visual view) for the project and its status, similar to Kanban and Agile, and helps the project team move forward.

The second issue is a bit more complicated because there are often conflicting measurements among the players on the project team. We see conflicting measures all the time, but the biggest conflict is between resource utilization and project velocity. During execution, the team constantly makes trade-offs between keeping people “productive” and maintaining the velocity of task completion. Blind Spot 5 – Misleading Metrics covers this conflict in detail.

I worked with a manufacturer’s engineering department and discovered that all the designers were working in isolation within their cubicles, unable to see the big picture. The projects were not moving. The meetings were not productive, which frustrated everyone involved even further. By changing how the team managed projects, they cleared a six-month backlog in less than 90 days.

The hidden threats project managers face are covered in my eBook, Blindsided! Five Invisible Project Threats Successful Managers Must See.

Blind Spot 3 – Put the Whip to WIP

The sooner you start, the sooner you finish, right? Perhaps you remember the tale of the tortoise and the hare. Sure, the hare is fast, but in the end, it’s the tortoise’s steady progress that wins the race. In project management, it’s not the speed of any individual project that matters; it’s the speed of all the projects that matters.

The problem with the “start early, finish early” approach is that when you’re dealing with several projects, everything starts early, and the system becomes clogged. The project management system looks like the freeways during rush hour (two analogies in two paragraphs!). The system becomes bogged down, slows down, and projects take longer and longer.

From a resource perspective, there’s a stack of work to be done. How to choose the right task? The one I enjoy most? The one we discussed in today’s project meeting? The small task I can wrap up before the weekend? So many choices, each resource choosing the correct sequence.

Undoubtedly, the “wrong” work will be done. Tasks will be started with incomplete information, resulting in repeated starts and stops, waiting, and rework. The project team spends its time sorting through piles of work to allocate resources, and then resorting as new information arrives. The resources are forced to stop and start again because the teams never quite get it exactly right.

The result? A loss of productivity. Longer project timelines. Costly expediting efforts. More management attention required. Unhappy customers. Unhappy people.

What can you do? Certainly, the synchronization task is complex when you have many projects, but you can clear the road a bit so you can see the way. Manage and limit the amount of work in the pipeline. Simple, yet difficult. Still, it must be done.

Managing the WIP:

• Reduces multitasking. With less work in the system, there is less sorting and resorting, and less stopping and starting due to priority errors.

• Reduces management attention. Less work, faster progress, no more managing the piles.

• Reduces rework. With less work in the system, attention can be directed toward clean starts

• Reduces average project lead times. Fewer queues, less wait time, and more time spent on the project.

A couple of things to keep in mind as you set your WIP level:

You can make gradual reductions; reduce by 25% if you’re worried about something going wrong. I’d start with a 50% reduction.

Watch your resource engagement; sometimes there is work in the system you’re unaware of, such as customers calling your engineers or developers directly.

Make sure it’s clear who sets work priorities. Controlling the release of new work into the system is both a capacity and a priority management task.

Unlimited “progress” and the other invisible threats are covered in my eBook, Blindsided! Five Invisible Project Threats Successful Managers Must See.

Blind Spot 4 – False Starts

Starting a task before you have everything needed to finish it inflates work in progress, creates rework, and adds unplanned cost across every project that shares those resources. Read Blind Spot 4 – False Starts.

Blind Spot 5 – Misleading Metrics

Resource owners, customer teams, and project managers are each measured on a different objective, and the project pays for the conflict in delays and compromises. Read Blind Spot 5 – Misleading Metrics.