5 Creative Methods to Recover Your Blown Schedule
Project schedule recovery plan - a quick 'How To'
Any project more complicated than your child’s birthday party will likely encounter problems that threaten to delay the target end date. Sometimes, those problems are solved without impacting project completion, especially if project planning included some contingency to account for unknowns. At other times, however, the project manager faces the very real threat that project completion may not happen as planned because of delays in critical path tasks.
Then it’s time to act. You will need a project schedule recovery plan. Before jumping to solutions, though, let’s take a look at some familiar causes for project schedule misses. Do any of these ring true from your experience?
• Causes for project schedule misses
♠ Planned schedule not supported by commitments.
Company ABD ran a project to outsource production to an external manufacturer (EM). They had decreed dates by which they wanted pilot and full production to start. The EM had agreed to those dates. However, there was nothing backing up the dates, so inevitably they were not met.
♠ Inadequate risk assessment.
Company HJM needed to redesign an electro-mechanical component to correct a field performance problem. They retained an engineering consultant with expertise in that type of component to conduct the detail design and testing. However, they did not consider the risk that the component manufacturer held aspects of their design IP as ‘trade secret’ and refused to participate in the redesign activity.
♠ Unauthorized scope changes after project is underway.
These are commonly known as “scope creep” – tasks added without being fully vetted by the program manager. They add effort and possibly result in failures or delays downstream.
• What’s your plan to green?
Okay, a delay has happened in your project; the status has turned red. How do your respond? Alan Mulally, retired CEO of Ford Motor Company, would pose the question in such cases, “What’s your plan to green?” (Excellent discussion in the book, Designing the Future, by James M. Morgan and Jeffrey K. Liker, McGraw Hill, 2019)
Here are five avenues from which you can choose, to implement a project schedule recovery plan based on the facts in front of you.
♦ Crash the project. Taken from the Project Management Institute (PMI) PMBOK®, this involves adding resources to the current plus next one or two critical path tasks to shorten their durations. Resources include people with the right skills, overtime, additional tools and test equipment, or outside lab assistance, as needed.
♦ Fast-track the project. Also from the PMI PMBOK® arsenal, fast-tracking is performing certain project tasks in parallel instead of serially. Although this is usually effective, it does carry some additional risk, particularly for tasks that have a dependency on completion of an earlier task.
♦ Conduct an Agile Kaizen event on your project. In lean manufacturing, a kaizen event is a continuous improvement activity, over a few days’ time, focused on a process operation in order to improve the process metrics (shorten processing time, reduce defects, etc.). Agile project techniques, such as weekly sprints and short-term deliverables, can be applied successfully even within a conventional or waterfall project. Use the Agile Kaizen technique to analyze and streamline selected remaining tasks, especially critical path.
♦ Daily Stand-up with PDSA-driven action plans. PDSA (Plan, Do, Study, Adjust) is a lean practice that can be applied to operations and engineering projects. PDSA may guide the project team to perform some experimental pre-testing ahead of system integration, for example, in order to get early data and expose risks before they become show-stoppers.
♦ Prevention. From my experience, the predominant reasons for missed completion dates trace back to preparation and planning. Projects that complete on time share these attributes:
⇒ Rigorously planned, with objective backup data and well-structured task dependencies.
⇒ All stakeholders are on board and aligned, and any conflicts get resolved during the Plan phase.
⇒ Project change control is put in place and tightly managed.
⇒ A kickoff event brings all stakeholders and team members together with a shared vision.
⇒ Project manager has actual authority and accountability to make decisions and set direction.
• Project schedule recovery plan: Set up for success
If you’re fortunate enough to be involved in planning the project you will manage, put in the effort to set up for success. If, however, you are assigned as the project manager sometime after kickoff, make your first priority to review existing plans thoroughly and probe on task plans, resources and skills, and risk files. Interview all stakeholders to get their viewpoints.
If anything you discover does not support the published schedule, address the issue head on; it won’t get better by itself. Rather than wait for a crisis that demands a difficult, reactive project schedule recovery plan, take action in advance.
You may need to re-plan the project from your current starting position, and strive to hit the best possible completion target. In that case, make the needed adjustments early, to “get to green” and stay on track!
Dann Gustavson, PMP®, Lean Six-Sigma Black Belt, helps Program Managers and their teams achieve superior results through high-impact program execution. Prepare, structure, and run successful programs in product engineering, manufacturing operations (including outsourcing), and cross-functional change initiatives.
Contact Dann@Lean6SigmaPM.com.