Visual project management

Visual Project

Management

Improve efficiency

of multi-disciplinary projects

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Introduction

Visual Project Management (VPM) will help you to improve efficiencyin a project management environment. It will help to achieve 100% of projects on time and within budget.

And in the meantime it will also:

1. Create a result driven culture2. Create ownership for KPI’s by connecting work to strategy3. Instill team work between project team members4. Create a culture of Continuous Improvement5. Create an environment where people learn from each other6. Remove behavior of arbitrary deadlines and budget7. The wish and urge to solve problems immediately8. A culture that is used to visual management of information

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What is Visual Project Management?

Visual Project Management is chiefly based on two Lean principles:

1. Obeya

2. Visual Management.

Obeya can be translated to ‘Big room’ or ‘War room’. Traditionally, it is a dedicated room in which a product development team meets, discusses progress, problems and the overall strategy.

Visual Management is an important principle to identify and distinguish between normal and abnormal conditions. It’s a vital part of 100% quality (Jidoka) and is adopted so no problems are hidden.

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How VPM improves efficiency

Visual Project Management improves efficiency by better project control:

1. Visualizing overall performance (KPI)

2. Visualizing the voice of the customer

3. Visualizing every project and its performance

4. Discussing overall and project performance regularlya) Focus on project progress to advance the project and meet deadlines

b) Focus on project costs to finish the project within the allotted budget

In addition, this visualization will connect actual work (projects) to overall performance (strategy). It will create ownership for your strategy.

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Visualizing overall performance

The acronym QCDMS can lead you to the right KPI: Quality, Costs, Delivery, Morale, and Safety.

Make KPI’s visual through easy-to-understand charts.

Use a target line to depict your goal over time.

Use clear status indicators to see if the KPI is positive or negative, compared to your target (smilies).

Update your KPI regularly and discuss the KPI every time you update it.

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Visualizing VOC

The Voice of the Customer in projects can be translated to your entire project portfolio for a year, or multiple years, including your customer’s most important business needs.

Add this to your Obeya.

Visualizing this fulfils the first principle of the well-known 5 lean principles: specify value from the standpoint of the customer.

Examples of customer’s business needs are:

Lowest operational costs

Highest output

Most dependable service

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Visualizing project performance (time)

Visualize the timeliness performance of every project through an easy-to-understand planning.

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How VPM improves efficiency (continued)

Above, you were shown ways how VPM improves project control. In addition to control, VPM improves efficiency by Continuous Improvement:

By exploring why a deadline is not met and defining root-causes

Common root-causes will initiate kaizen

This will create a culture of Jidoka (Built-in quality by stop and fix).

In the next slides, I will show you how to obtain this Continuous Improvement.

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Act Plan

DoCheck

Meet deadlines through catch-up plans

Whenever a deadline will be slipped or is slipped, stop and fix (Jidoka). Let the responsible project owner present a catch-up plan in order to meet the deadline. This catch-up plan exists out of to-do items.

Give this catch up plan and to-do items a deadline, so focus stays on these actions. Add these to a whiteboard, and begin every meeting with these items.

“Have you completed this action item? If not, why not?” LEAD BY EXAMPLE.

To accommodate team members, hand them an A4 that contains general project information, the planning, room for the catch-up plan, and room to put information they might want to add themselves.

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Catch-up plans in detail

A catch-up plan should ideally be defined before a meeting takes place in your Obeya. This will be the most beneficial for project progress.

If team members notice a deadline is slipped, or will almost slip, they must anticipate and define a catch-up plan. Their catch-up plan can be briefly discussed in the meeting, in order to instill group learning and team work.

Examples of catch-up actionable items are:

Expedite delivery of materials through purchasing staff

Plan a meeting with someone

Agree with a third party to deliver information earlier

Call instead of e-mail someone to speed up waiting times

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Starting the Continuous Improvement Cycle

If the above will be adopted and adequately followed by a project team, efficiency will rise. However, to start Continuous Improvement you need one more step.

Delays are directly solved by team members. But the solution to these problems may not have taken away the root-cause, and the delay might occur again.

Add a whiteboard where you put every project delay. Define the delay as simple as possible. It is time to find commonalities in project delays (A form of Pareto).

This list will grow over time, and eventually you will need to start kaizen to eliminate root-causes for frequently occurring delays (Kaizen means a multi-discipinary improvement project).

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Kaizen board to have overview

A kaizen board is also know as a Kamishibai. It is a simple visual overview of every kaizen that is going on. Status can be either OK, or any of the PDCA phases (Plan, Do, Check, Act).

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Kaizen board

# Status Owner Problem Statement Root cause Counter measure Lead KPI Deadline

1 OK X Y Z ABC R > 1 14-11-2014

2 P

3 D

Kaizen suggestion system

As an extra feature of your Visual Project Management initiative, you may want to reserve room on the whiteboard where team members can communicate general issues that cannot be distilled from project delays, but do frustrate them or make their job more difficult.

If you do this, make sure every issue is discussed during your meeting. Every issue should either be solved during the meeting (if possible and time allows it), planned for kaizen, or should be parked, with a date attached to it when you discuss it again.

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Concerns

Strictly guarding the concept of VPM is vital. If the team leader is arbitrary about deadlines, the team will be arbitrary about them. Thus, leading by example is imperative.

The strategy you adopt should always be a part of your overall strategy. Otherwise VPM might not be supported by your senior leaders.

Having a large project portfolio creates the risk of multi-tasking. Every time you encounter wait times during a project, you accept it and start working on another project. Obviously, wait times can be natural, but wait times should be eliminated as much as possible. Multi-tasking means work-in-progress (WIP), and WIP leads to longer lead times (Little’s Law). VPM will lead to eliminating wait times, but will not eliminate multi-tasking. The team should recognize that multi-tasking equals inefficiency.

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