Cut Your Project Schedule in Half
Today's businesses are project based, and most projects are team based. Which means the project manager must juggle a matix of tasks associated with people, time, and costs to yeild the best project in the end.
Since the success of the company is tied to producing more with less, it is up to the project manager to optimize all the variables by emphasizing the right variable at the right time throughout the project. A traditional method of doing this is by using a project's critical path to know which task needs to be focused on to be sure the project finishes on time. This works fine for linear project schedules, but a problem is introduced when the project includes an iterative process such as design and testing stages. These stages may cycle again and again many times before it gets done right. This is potentially a problem when time is extremely expensive or the risk of missing a deadline is critically high.
These are the times to begin thinking outside the box and start questioning what you know to be true. Re-examine your business model and look for areas that are high risk or extremely expensive. The development project I'm doing now has an extremely high interest payment each month.
After analyzing the cost compared to the cost of paying overtime or early completion bonuses, it made financial sense to offer our consultants bonuses to complete their work early. Every day the project was in not complete meant thousands of dollars in interest to the bank. The cost of a few thousand dollars to incentivise the consultants to cut a week or two from the schedule resulted in true savings.
Or perhaps cutting the due diligence schedule in half meant you could make a well informed go/no-go decision before going hard on a land purchase, avoiding tremendous risk on your part. This sort of strategy is what separates the successful developers from the unsuccessful ones. Quantifying the real cost or risk and taking action to minimize or eliminate it through creative project managment.
Every project manager knows that pushing your consultants too hard constantly can lead to burn out. Knowing when to push for fast results and allowing them to rest after a period of solid performance can lead to better results and build trust between you and the consultants. Similar to a sprinter, both you and the consultant should practice Sprint Managment. Think of it as playing the game "Hot Potato". If the hot potato is in your hands, respond quickly...very quickly. Not in a few days...NOW!! Work overtime if you have to. Get rid of the hot potato. Go into full sprint knowing that you will have time to rest once you get rid of the hot potato. If everyone involved knows this to be the status quo for your projects, it can eliminate a tremendous amount of idle down time between tasks.
When a casino in Las Vegas is planned for construction the project manager knows that for every day the casino is NOT open, the company is potentially losing millions of dollars. So squeezing the schedule to the absolute minimum takes some creativity and new ways of doing things. They found that if they build the interiors of each room and disassemble the room down to every nut and bolt to then package the contents in a box, they can save valuable time by delivering that box to the room for fast installation when the building structure is completed. This is called batching. It isn't the usual way of doing business, but sometimes you can save a lot of money by doing business in new ways.
The last project managment tool worth looking at is the use of
Charrettes. Wikipedia defines a
Charrette as an intense period of design activity in which a group of designers draft a solution to a design problem. Charrettes often take place in multiple sessions in which the group divides into sub-groups. Each sub-group then presents its work to the full group as material for future dialogue. Such charrettes serve as a way of quickly generating a design solution while integrating the aptitudes and interests of a diverse group of people. I like to use Charrettes at the begining of each project when it is necessary to identify as many design constraints as possible during the due diligence phase of the project. Time is critical when you have a short time to make a go/no-go decision to accept the project or not. I've previously lost months of valuable time because the engineer might review the site and give his ideas before the architect generates his ideas, and then I will review the reports and concepts to then offer my ideas. And around we go. Iteration after iteration. By getting everyone together for a very intense 4-5 day charrette can be VERY productive and save you months of merry-go-round project management. See how to conduct a 4 day charrette by visiting the
National Charrette Institute.