Congestion

Many organizations suffer from project congestion: far too many projects in progress at the same time.

The reason is not surprising in our impatient world, with ongoing changes from customers, owners, authorities, and many urgent problems to solve; there are many ideas for projects with promising cost versus benefit. It is simply hard to say no or refuse good projects.

The result is not surprising. Because of too little capacity (especially from key resources and too little capacity for planning and control) projects are getting delayed repeatedly and lead time grows to unacceptable levels.

What to do?

1. First, clean up: go through all your projects, each project's status, future requirements, cost/benefit and all the risk factors. For each project, decide whether it is still worth doing or if it should be cancelled.
   
2. For all remaining projects make the ideal plan in terms of lead time considering dependencies and minimum calendar time needed for each task.
   
3. Assign budget resources to all tasks ahead with the right skills and the estimated need of hours daily or weekly.
   
4. Compare the needed capacity with the available capacity from in house people as well as externals per. required skill.
   
5. Analyze carefully and decide again if there are projects which should be discarded.
   

   
    

For the future you should consider implementing systematic Project Portfolio Management to help debate project proposals and arrive at a common objective, understanding that there are limits to respect and priorities must be made.

The importance of short lead times in multi project environments

Multi project environments resemble industrial manufacturing in many ways. One resemblance is that planning generally is about finding the best balance between short lead time and high utilization of critical resources.

We define the lead time is the period from start of a project (or part) to completion.

Our advice is to aim for as short project lead time as possible because it results in so many positive things:

1. Quicker benefits. A project will normally be decided to improve something; there will be a cost of the project and a projected benefit. Therefore the sooner the completion the earlier the benefits will be obtained.
   
2. Less money in the works. During project time cost will be incurred and an investment is made. The longer the period the more accumulated money is spent. Money which comes at a price, normally interest or risk of default on payments.
   
3. Less wasted time on starting up again. Whenever people have to change to other tasks during a day the more time risk being wasted because the person has to reorient himself and get up to speed again.
   
4. Effective dynamic coordination. Generally it is believed that putting pressure on lead time makes people become more responsible and inventive in solving not foreseen disruptions. By lowering the sea level the rocks appear so you can navigate around them.
   

You may ask: Are there no disadvantages? I can think of none other than overdoing it. Overdoing it can cause trouble with workload for bottleneck resources and there must be some flexibility in the project plan to swallow the unforeseen, if the plans are too tight, the slightest disturbance can create ripple effects,

There are a number of ways lead time can be shortened if you have good knowledge about your project content and the resource requirements. And this is really the challenge: Careful project design. The more a new project resembles other earlier projects, the better the possibility is for gathering experience and utilizing it in the planning for new projects.

You should think about:

1. Parallel processing. Look to see where there no interdependencies and make parallel branches in the work break down structure (WBS).
   
2. Within the same branch find where you can permit overlapping, i.e. an activity can be started before the previous activity has ended.
   
3. Where you can speed up an activity by assigning more resource capacity, e.g. more people, of course without adding too much extra cost for coordination and/or having resources spending all their time for a period on that particular activity.
   

Again the devil is often to be found in the resources and their capacity. If two activities which theoretically could run in parallel use the same critical resource (which perhaps already is overloaded) it will of course not be possible.

Shortening of lead times is based on resource management.

The lesson from manufacturing: the need for resource management.

The pulse of the world is beating faster and faster and change is the mantra of today’s organizational life. Change in technology, in product development, in systems and communication, in business processes and in the way we set up organizations.

Change means many projects concurrently; often in a collaboration between different organizations (the initiator or client and one or more so called professional service organizations) specialized in this or that. And most often people are involved in several tasks in parallel within a period of time.

And how do we go about it? We treat project management as artisans and amateurs thinking that each project is one of a kind, difficult to plan and predict regarding scope, content and timing. After all, it is driven by the people. Thus we fail to be systematic about it. And we fail to look across all projects and their resources and synchronize their use in a realistic, transparent way.

Take a look at the reality and you will see that there should be room for improvement:
- Few projects meet the milestones and deadlines
- Many projects end up being cancelled or put on hold
- People are uncertain of the priorities. They see constant firefighting and crises. They feel overburdened and get stress
- We don’t seem to learn from experience.

The situation is like the situation in industry before Henry Ford, in the beginning of the previous century, set up the production lines for the famous Ford T; before standardization of components and processes; before the Sloane School of systematic pursuit of productivity.

I do believe it is about time we take advantage of the learning from the manufacturing industry and transfer it to the field of multi project management. In manufacturing you will always define the outcome (dimensions, accuracy, surface, quality etc.) in conjunction with the capability of the process equipment to be used.
And when you make your production plan you will carefully take the finite capacity of your equipment into account.

In project work we fail to see the definition of tasks and the assignment of resources as two inseparable dimensions.

We need to be more much more systematic and precise in the way we define tasks and what is needed to execute them as specified. We need to try to decompose as much as possible into standard task elements and relate that to resource skills and capacities. And when we make the plans we don’t see across all projects and control resource capacity and priorities. Again and again we fail to discover the bottlenecks before it is too late.

We need to integrate resource management and productivity thinking into project planning.

You need to know your resources in detail:
- What are their skills in relation to tasks you want them to do?
- What is their real available capacity at any given time taking vacations, working hours by weekday, other non project work they have to do?
- What are their real cost and earning potentials?
- What is their total workload from all the projects they are assigned to? Are there idle periods and bottleneck periods?
Some of you will probably think that this is futile because:
- Doing projects is more difficult than producing a toaster as projects are generally more difficult to define.
- People are humans, not machines. They get sick, need vacation, have a bad day, get confused, are undisciplined and they are innovative.
- People have many combinations of skills and work better with some than others.
- People can and often prefer to switch between several tasks in a day.

All that is true, but this is not an excuse not to work on getting better data and systematically learn from the experience.

Let’s have just a brief look at the historic background. Long ago Adam took a bite of the apple and started the quest for knowledge. With the Renaissance and the birth of natural science (Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, later Darwin and many, many others) mankind started a relentless pursuit of better and better technologies for food production, manufacture of tools, transportation and communication.

Globalization is brought about by cheap transportation and open communication. Everybody is trying to keep pace and stay in the game. This means change – on all levels and degrees of complexity. And more and more is being organized as projects.
A project is simply defined as one or more tasks which might have interdependencies. Some can run in parallel others in sequence.

The more formal project management culture and systems originated in USA in the 1950-ties with the big defense projects. The emphasis was on planning and control of the individual large project often with 1000’s of tasks defined in huge networks. Mathematical algorithms were developed finding the critical path and adjusting the timing of others tasks to that. Still today, most research and efforts to standardize project management is focused on how to run the individual project. The winners are those who manage multiple projects and their resources most effectively.