1. Finishing Projects Fast
James R. Burns
Professor of Operations Management and Information Technology
Texas Tech University

2. Presentation by James R. Burns
Outline--Sources
Generalities
Goldratt concepts
Mascitelli concepts
McCONNELL concepts
Kerzner concepts
Maturity concepts
Other sources
Presentation by James R. Burns

3. Presentation by James R. Burns
Goal:
Make some suggestions as to how projects can be completed fast and frugally
Presentation by James R. Burns

4. Presentation by James R. Burns
Most firms
Recognize project management to be a core competence today
Have established project management centers of excellence for training and development of project managers and project management careers
Encourage their employees to propose project initiatives with simple one-page statements of work
Presentation by James R. Burns

5. Rationale for Reducing Project Duration
Time Is Money: Cost-Time Tradeoffs
Reducing the time of a critical activity usually incurs additional direct costs.
Cost-time solutions focus on reducing (crashing) activities on the critical path to shorten overall duration of the project.
Reasons for imposed project duration dates:
Time-to-market pressures
Unforeseen delays
Incentive contracts (bonuses for early completion)
Imposed deadlines and contract commitments
Overhead and public goodwill costs
Pressure to move resources to other projects

6. Options for Accelerating Project Completion
Resources Not Constrained
Adding resources
Outsourcing project work
Scheduling overtime
Establishing a core project team
Do it twice—fast and then correctly
Resources Constrained
Fast-tracking
Critical-chain concepts
Reducing project scope
Compromise quality (not really)

7. Notes on shortening project durations
(Most of this must be done in the Planning and Budgeting stage)
Crashing
Reducing the duration of tasks on the critical path by adding resources
Fast-tracking
Starting tasks sooner
Checking for parallelism opportunities in the schedule
Pull as much work off of the critical path as you can
Be aware of critical chain issues
Presentation by James R. Burns

8. More Tips on shortening project durations
REUSE, REUSE, REUSE
Do it right the first time
Eliminate non-value-added work activities
Make projects lean
Avoid changes to requirements
But what if the requirements are unstable??
Presentation by James R. Burns

9. Presentation by James R. Burns
Knowledge Reuse…
Requirements Reuse
Based on a Classification of projects
Mapped/Programmed Projects--Everything is driven by and proceeds from the requirements
Project Plan
Functional Specification
Design Document
Code
Tests and Test Documentation
ALL OF WHICH CAN BE REUSED
Presentation by James R. Burns

10. The Quality View on FAST projects:
Do it Right the First Time!!!
The further down the lifecycle the defects are found, the more expensive and time consuming they are to fix.
Presentation by James R. Burns

11. The problem of Complexity
In the early days of simpler code, it used to take a day or less to fix a bug
Now, with greatly increased code complexity, it takes weeks sometimes.
Complexity greatly increases
time and cost
Presentation by James R. Burns

12. Avoid changes to requirements
If possible freeze requirements during execution and control stage
Presentation by James R. Burns

13. Lean Project Management
Customer-perceived value should drive everything
What is the value proposition??
If we were to advertise in the WSJ that we have twice as many walkthroughs as our closest competition, would that garner any additional customers for us?
Remove what does not add value
Presentation by James R. Burns

14. Principles of Lean Concepts Applied to Projects
Precisely specify the value of the project
Identify the value stream for each project
Allow value to flow without interruptions
Let the customer pull value from the project team
Continuously pursue perfection
Presentation by James R. Burns

15. Which of the following adds value?
Conducting a weekly team coordination
Hunting for needed information
Presenting Project status to upper management
Creating formal project documents
Gaining multiple approvals for a project document
Waiting in queues for available resources
Presentation by James R. Burns

16. Time Batching--Another Time Waster
Analysis paralysis
Approval cycles
Formal document release
Regularly scheduled meetings
Planning cycles
Work queues
Presentation by James R. Burns

17. More techniques for shortening projects
Scrub the requirements during or prior to the planning phase
Remove from the requirements those items that add little or no value
Remember the Pareto principle—80% of the value comes from 20% of the functionality
REMOVE SAFETY—GOLDRATT
Resist multitasking and student syndrome
Presentation by James R. Burns

18. Presentation by James R. Burns
Safety
Extra time placed in an estimated task time
Remove safety and put it in a time buffer at the end of the project
Safety, when its buried in the tasks of the project, is a bad thing because of….
Multitasking, also a bad thing
Student syndrome
Task dependencies
Can’t be passed along or accumulated
Presentation by James R. Burns

19. Everybody overestimates the time required to do their task
According to Goldratt
(This is called SAFETY, as we said)
Does anybody want to talk about how much safety they put into their estimates?
Is this true in software development?
It is if you have an expert doing the estimating, who really knows how long it will take him
Presentation by James R. Burns

20. What happens after that--a possible scenario
The team leader adds safety time to the task to cover his responsibilities
The project leader adds more safety time
The project manager may add still more safety time
Presentation by James R. Burns

21. Implication>>>
Most of the time we have built into our projects is …..
Safety
Safety
Safety
Presentation by James R. Burns

22. The project manager must stay focused
Or the project will not be finished on time, within budget
This means applying the Pareto principle
80% of the benefit comes from 20% of the activities
By the time progress reports indicate something is wrong, its usually too late
Progress reports tell you that 90% of the project is finished in 90% of the required time.
However, another equal period of time is required to complete the remaining “10%,” in many cases
Presentation by James R. Burns

23. It is hard to stay focused when:
There are too many project paths on-going, in parallel
There are many critical or near critical paths
There are many projects being managed concurrently
Presentation by James R. Burns

24. Measurements are a major problem with projects
Measurements should induce the parts to do what is good for the system as a whole
Measurements should direct managers to the point that needs their attention
So often it occurs that we measure the wrong thing.
The wrong measure leads to the wrong behavior
Tell me how you measure me and I will show you how I behave
Presentation by James R. Burns

25. More Measurements -- EVA-5 -5 -5
+15
Presentation by James R. Burns

26. Projects are like chains
Each task in sequence is a link in a chain
Each link has two things
weight, to which cost is analogous
strength, to which throughput (time) is analogous
Presentation by James R. Burns

27. Presentation by James R. Burns
Cost vs Throughput
Goldratt maintains that management in the cost world is a mirage
efficiency becomes paramount
local improvements are necessary to get global ones
Goldratt suggests the managers should manage in the throughput world, a totally different paradigm
must find the constraint--the weakest link
concentrate on that
By the way, what is the ultimate constraint???
Presentation by James R. Burns

28. Remember the five steps of TOC
IDENTIFY the project constraint--the critical path
Decide how to EXPLOIT that constraint
SUBORDINATE everything to that decision
ELEVATE the systems’ constraint
Go back to step 1, and find another constraint
Presentation by James R. Burns

29. Presentation by James R. Burns
Safety
Safety is however much time is added on to a task beyond its mean time of completion
Presentation by James R. Burns

30. Probabilistic task durations
Late durations tend to accumulate and may increase the length of the project
Early durations do not show up
This explains why safety disappears
Presentation by James R. Burns

31. Presentation by James R. Burns
More Measurements -5 -5 -5
+15
Presentation by James R. Burns

32. Other problems with safety
Is wasted by the “student syndrome”
Basically, this is procrastination
Is wasted by multitasking (a person who works on several tasks at the same time)
With each change of task, a set up is required
Is wasted by dependencies between steps
These dependencies cause delays to accumulate, but advances are wasted
Delays get passed on; advances don’t
Presentation by James R. Burns

33. Problems other than safety
Early start vs. late start
Existing measurements are worthless because they are based on a cost world mentality, according to Goldratt
Existing measurements (Earned Value Analysis) do not take into consideration the critical path
We’re talking about BCWP, BCWS, ACWP, CV, SV, CPI, SPI, BAC, EAC, etc.
Presentation by James R. Burns

34. Early Start vs. Late StartB 5 A 5 E 10 D 10 C 10
Presentation by James R. Burns

35. How much Safety is there likely to be?
Will project professionals admit how much safety they are putting into their estimates?
What happens when these professionals are asked to cut their durations by 10%, next time?
These professionals want to be 100% sure of getting finished on time
Therefore, the durations are likely to be twice as long as they should be
So CUT THEM IN HALF
Presentation by James R. Burns

36. Presentation by James R. Burns
Solutions
Take the safety out of the individual tasks and put it at the end of the critical path in the time buffer, called a project buffer
This means making the tasks roughly 50-60% as long as they would otherwise be.
Presentation by James R. Burns

37. Presentation by James R. Burns
More solutions
At the point where each feeding path intersects with the critical path, place another time buffer, called a feeding buffer. The feeding buffer protects the critical path from delays occurring in the corresponding non-critical paths.
When resources are needed on the critical path, these resources are advised ahead of time exactly when they must make themselves available. When that time comes, they must drop everything else and do the required critical tasks.
Presentation by James R. Burns

38. Measurement solutions
Measure progress only on the critical path; what percent of the critical path we have already completed. This is all we care about!!
Have a project leader measure progress on a non critical path in terms of unused buffer days
Presentation by James R. Burns

39. Shrinking the task time: Effects
There is less procrastination
There is much more focus
There is less multitasking
Presentation by James R. Burns

40. Presentation by James R. Burns
More Suggestions
Put your “BEST” people on the critical path
Watch out for critical chains
Presentation by James R. Burns

41. Presentation by James R. Burns
What are the ramifications of a delayed software product, intended for commercial sale?
Less market share
Less profit; maybe no profit
Lower analyst profit expectations
Declining share price
Out of business?
How many firms has Microsoft driven out of business?
Ask Philippe Khan (founder of Borland) what the implications of getting a product late to the marketplace are
Presentation by James R. Burns

42. What about Procurement
Most firms enter into LOSE/LOSE Strategies
A fixed-price lowest bidder contract is LOSE/LOSE Strategy
This forces Contractors to under bid their costs, hoping to make it back on the changes to the requirements that the customer will have to pay for
Instead, Contractors should be induced to deliver product on time, with as much functionality as possible
How would you do this?
Presentation by James R. Burns