Quote of the Day

I got a response to a recent post from James Graham of Training4Change.com. James has a great quote on his site.

Hard Times = Focus on Details

My response to James pointed out a paradigm we used at a large Department of Energy site:

• The Plan of the Week
• The Plan of the Day

We currently use the Plan of the Work process on our DoD and NASA programs. It's a simple concept - as always. "What does DONE look like for this week?" By DONE I mean tangible evidence agree on the previous Thursday as to what would be "done" by the Close of Business (COB) the coming Friday.

I found the chartering document for our Plan of the Day. The PoD was used as we approached the end of a multi-billion $ environmental cleanup program, that was once one of the top three toxic waste sites on the planet. Here's a redacted version from 2003, that still serves us well to this day "in hard times," and for that matter "all the time."

The Plan of the Day Paradigm

In the coming weeks the POD will evolve to more closely match the system used to report labor, materials, and subcontractor invoices on CH2M HILL’s invoice to Kaiser Hill. Our first change will be to use the POD as a “true” Plan of the Day and assign the weekly planning, task planning, and long range planning activities to separate meetings. The Plan of the Day will be structured in the following way.

The First 15 Minutes of a 30 minute meeting:

1. On the previous Thursday, the Plan of the Week meeting will be held for Site activities. These meetings will be lead respectively by "Bob" and "Sally." In these meetings the activities for the coming week will be verified and captured on a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will be extracted from the Project Server (PS). “The usual suspects” will be invited to plan the next week’s work.

2. For the sire process group and the “Level of Effort” group a “to do” list will be prepared. This list will be maintained in the PS (shared folder in Share Point Team Services). In the coming weeks the POD will be extracted from a “to do” list, but for now let’s use STS as a public folder for the spreadsheet.

3. During the first 15 minutes of the Plan of the Day we will all report the activities scheduled for the day from the respective spread sheets, ordered by the current Project sequence.

a. Line items on the spreadsheet will be used to direct the discussion.

b. We will make every attempt to hold the discussion to the items on the spreadsheet and avoid discussing “off topic” items.

c. If there are items planned for the day that are not on the spreadsheet they will be noted and added AFTER the first 15 phase of the meeting.

d. Let’s make every effort to hold the discussion to the “plan of the day.”

For the second 15 minutes:

4. After the Plan of the Day items have been reviewed, and any additions, changes, or deletes made, we can move to “new business,” which will include a. Items that need to be discussed in support of the Plan of the Day. b. Items that did not complete yesterday but are now rescheduled for today or some future date.

Post POD

5. At the conclusion of the previous section (15 minutes) any remaining issues will be resolved in an off line meeting.

Some Guidelines for Moving the POD Forward

1. Let’s only talk about items that will be done today, or items that will impact what’s planned to be done today.
2. Each person responsible for presenting items during the POD will have a spreadsheet with the POD items and hand them out at the start of the POD. We’ll set up the protocol for maintaining the versions of these reports during this week, but let’s start by having the materials ready to go the first day.

Next POD Steps

1. This week the POW and POD reporting tools will be complete, so any item that is in the Project Server can be reported out to a spreadsheet for the desired week. This is the mechanism used by the Projects (although they may use Primavera instead of Project Server). Once this effort is complete we’ll have a reliable, automated way of producing the Plan of the Week and at the POW meetings automatically producing the POD for the coming week.
2. For level of effort activities, we start “scheduling” work on a level of effort basis. This will involve defining what work is done now and what work is outside the daily operational activities. We’ll “Projectize” this work.
3. The next step is to discover the resource requirements for the week as well as future weeks. This is a larger effort, but required if we are to plan our work and work our plan (this is a well worn phrase but one we should learn to live by). This involves resource loading the work. We won’t resource level the work but we’ll make every effort to assign the proper resources to the plan.

My Personal Opinion

Much of the difficulties I see on projects where "The Lazy PM" comes in is where there is no clear and concise mission, there is no "do or die" culture," no promise made to the US Congress to "get the job done." Programs like "Fly to space station, dock, stay for 6 months, return, don't kill anyone on purpose." "Clean up a contaminated site, stay under budget, stay ahead of schedule over 7 years, and don't kill anyone." Or, fly to Hubble, change the batteries, and wide field camera, anbd don't break the telescope."

Projects like that don't have time to waste in meetings that don't produce tangible measureable outcomes, they don't have the 80/20 problem.

EVERYTHING is important. If it's not important it would appear in the Integrated Master Schedule, it would not be funded, there would be no staff assigned to un-important work.

One of our mentors had a great piece of advice.

When he called a meeting (he was a SVP at a large telecom firm), he'd ask each person coming into the room to state "what value they were going to provide to the meeting when it was over. How were they going to move the problem foreword?" If they could no answer the question with a clear and concise answer, they had to leave - "you're wasting my time!"

That approach, the Plan of the Day, Plan of the Week, and Plan of the Month, all anchored in the Integrated Master Schedule, could replace all the chatty stuff in most of the PM books of "how to be a better PM."

What have you done for me lately, what are you going to do for me next week? everyone get back to work, was the mantra of a Program Manager on a multi-billion coal gasification program in South Africa. He showed us how to manage as young managers. I never forgot those words.