Project Rhythm

   

Bas de Baar on Project Shrink has a guest post titled "What Does a Well Run Project Sound Like?" The idea of a project rhythm is common if not mandated in the aerospace and defense and large construction business. But just participating in the business rhythm meetings is necessary but not sufficient for project success.
    The Business Rhythm Meeting must be guided by a Plan and a Schedule for the work being performed. First comes the Plan. The Plan is a Strategy for the successful completion of the project or program.
    Let's talk about strategy. Wikipedia says (and you should get your own sources, but this one fits our needs)

Strategy is the plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. Strategy is different from tactics. Tactics are concerned with the conduct of the work. Strategy is concerned with how different work elements are linked in a chain to produce value for the program.

    The project's strategy is the Plan for doing the work in a way that minimizes risk, maximizes value, conserves resources, and guides the tactics along the path of least resistance to the end.
    In order to execute the strategy we need to Schedule the work activities. When the Strategy and the Schedule are integrated you get the Integrated Master Plan / Integrated Master Schedule (IMP/IMS) paradigm, mandated by US DoD and used to great advantage in the Enterprise IT domain. What this approach tells us is:

1. What does done look like for the entire program?
2. What does done look like for some point in time where we want to put the produced capabilities to work?
3. What does done look like for a periodic assessment - say once a month? How about a Week?
4. What does done like like for each Business Rhythm meeting?

You get the idea. If we don't know what done looks like, we can't really have a meaningful Business Rhythm meeting, so several reasons:

1. When we sit in the room we want to talk about past performance. That's nice. But the real discussion needs to be about the the future performance of the project.
2. Using the past performance, how can we improve the future performance to get to done on-time, on-budget, and with the the capabilities the customer is paying for.

So  what does a well runs project "sound" like:

1. A walk through of the planned deliverables for the past period
2. A discussion of any missed deliverables
3. A statement about how and when these deliverable will "get to green," meaning when will they be delivered and how much extra that will cost. It has to cots more because it is likely we spent the money to NOT deliver them.
4. What are the deliverables for the next period of performance, and do we have everything we need to show up on-time, on-budget, on-spec?

The core concept of the business rhythm paradigm, is:

The Project is Lost One Day at a Time - If we don't know what done looks like we can't have a meaningful conversation of progress

and

How Long You Are We Willing to Wait Before We Find Out We Are Late?

The role of the business rhythm is to ask and answer these question at least once a week.

There is no reason to work hard, work harder, have meetings about working hard or harder, if we don't know what DONE looks like.