Brainstorming as neologism began with Alex Osborn of the advertising agency BBDO in 1942. His primary concern was creative thinking. In general, classical brainstorming generally follows this pattern: Gather a group of people Decide on a duration and quantity of ideas desired Solicit ideas from group members No editing, snide comments, or insults Collect ideas […]
The real kaizen is all about the 10,000 things. Maasaki Imai’s description of relentless, creeping quality improvement is apt. It also fits with the comprehensive philosophy of total quality management (TQM). We say “real” kaizen because we have so-called kaizen events that have nothing to do with inexorable cultural change and a whole to do […]
Project managers need to be able to assess product quickly with an intelligible set of quality metrics. In general, we recommend paired metrics; for example, in software development we can look at lines of code versus errors per line to keep both metrics “honest.” In the automotive world we like to see Cpk, which is […]
To reduce the chances of going too far down the wrong road, we qualify our projects with some sort of business analysis, for example internal rate of return or return on investment or some other fiduciary measurement. If we are working from a staged-gate project management system, we will relentlessly review our project condition against […]
Many organizations struggle with the development of risk response plans. Often they ignore this important step altogether. The reasons for this are numerous, but mostly involve the desire to avoid tying up scarce project resources in the development of a plan the project hopes to never use. So why don’t organizations out-source this effort? The […]
One of the ways to reduce our risk is to outsource. If we do not have the requisite knowledge or available talent readily available, we can chose to outsource to organizations with this expertise or volume of talent. Outsourcing can improve our chances of success in this regard. We also have recourse should the outsourced […]
A project comes to an end and now we are in a position to really critique or learn how things went. Ideally, we were learning all along, and now we have the final opportunity to review the project. If our organization has heavy project management influences, we may have a “white book” that captures the […]
Knowing a risk exists and not taking action is similar to standing on the tracks watching as the train nears. You must spend time creating alternative plans in the event the train does, in fact, come. It has been our observation that most project teams, under the pressure to deliver to the current plan, do […]
I have been having a running discussion with one of my colleagues regarding project and cost, specifically the cost of a project that is under consideration for termination. A project is going through a gate review. During this review we find that the objectives are not met by this phase and further action has little […]
The longer a project is active, the more likely there will be interference with the other projects the organization undertakes. We believe this is one of the attractions of scrum or the other agile project management methods, which are designed to offset the fallacious multitasking approaches. In these agile models, we find the project team […]