Apr 28 2017
7 questions to help you reduce project durations | Christian Hohmann
“[…]Organizations dealing repeatedly with projects will soon develop templates of Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) holding the most current tasks and milestones. These canvasses speed up somewhat the project initiation and ensure some degree of standardization.
Over time though, the copy-pasting from one project to the next, the addition of “improvements” and requirements as well as countermeasures to problems kind of inflate the templates and the projects. This, in turn, extends the project’s duration as every additional task not only adds its allocated time to completion, but also the safety margin(s) the doer and/or project manager will add on top.[…]”
Sourced through Chris Hohmann
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
The project management literature astonishingly fails to provide guidance on the art of breaking a project down into tasks. The “Body of Knowledge” tells you what a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) should look like but not how you actually break a project down into meaningful pieces, whether it is a dinner party, the construction of a bridge, or a moon shot. For a manager who has to make a plan, this makes templates irresistible: instead of thinking, you just fill in the blanks.
Chris’s questions are certainly relevant but I would like to go further and propose a few rules for generating a WBS.
“Imagine going to work at 7:30 every night and spending the next 12 hours, including meals and breaks, inside a factory where your only job is to insert a single screw into the back of a smartphone, repeating the task over and over and over again. During the day, you sleep in a shared dorm room, and in the evening, you wake up and start all over again.That’s the routine that Dejian Zeng experienced when he spent six weeks working at an iPhone factory near Shanghai, China, last summer. […]. Unlike many of those workers, Zeng did not need to do the job to earn a living. He’s a grad student at New York University, and he worked at the factory for his summer project.”
“This year is the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI). There will surely be a big celebration. But in my view, there is less to celebrate than meets the eye. Here’s why:
May 5 2017
Is Lean a set of tools – or a set of principles? | Pascal Dennis
“Is Lean a set of tools – or a set of principles? If the latter, we’ll fall far short of our potential”
Sourced through LinkedIn
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
Because of the way the meaning of Lean has changed over the past 25 years, I think it’s too late to ask this question. On the other hand, it is relevant about TPS or about the art of designing and improving manufacturing operations, whatever shorter name you want to give it.
Continue reading…
Share this:
Like this:
By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: Lean, Lean Principles, Lean Tools, TPS