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.