Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [95]
At the portfolio of projects level system, all the projects are grouped by product type, business type, or organization type and must be managed to ensure that each customer is satisfied. Unfortunately, the need dates of the customers are independent and are not necessarily able to be coordinated across a portfolio (Fig. 6-4).
At this level, conflicts between projects for limited shared resources become more visible. Unfortunately, there are often compromises made—which projects will be given higher priority for resources versus others, and many projects struggle as they have to manage without the benefit of being the “hot” project.
Finally, at the resource management level, the organization needs not only to plan what capacities they must have to support current and future project work, but also handle how to deploy the current resources to the queue of the tasks for each project—each with a project and/or portfolio priority. The managers of this system constantly juggle the capacity available and task execution priorities (Fig. 6-5).
The resource manager is often put into the position of switching resources back and forth to the new squeakiest wheel (task), trying to spread the capacity where it might do the most good against a seemingly never-ending queue.
FIGURE 6-4 Multi-project environment. ©1991–2010 Avraham Y. Goldratt Institute, LP. All rights reserved.
What Do We Improve?
With all these different systems and owners, it appears that approaching system improvement in project environments is like the “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” the Indian fable immortalized in the poem by John Godfrey Saxe (1873, 77–78) Project management system improvement has some interesting challenges. There are many owners of these different “systems,” each with their own view of what needs to improve. As long as these systems are not aligned to work in concert, there will be little opportunity for real improvement. This means that the relationships between these systems need to be understood. Ultimately, the capacity of the organization (either based on its limited capacity resources or the amount of a type of work that be can be taken on in a window of time) should dictate how much work is accepted in the portfolio or pipeline. Only then can individual project commitments be made. Task priorities then should be based on this release of work and the actual availability of “ready to work” tasks. Adjustments should only be made to task list priorities when there is objective data that the project require for the task to be expedited. The key to improvement is this alignment of these systems of systems and, with this understanding, translating Lean Six Sigma to drive value, minimizes waste.
Translating Lean into the Project System of Systems for Improvement
Lean manufacturing could be summarized by what has been attributed to Eiji Toyoda in describing a pillar of the Toyota Production System: “providing exactly what the customer wants; when the customer needs it; in the correct quantity and in the expected sequence, without defects; at the lowest possible cost.” We must consider the importance of this concept, but apply it to each of the system of systems in a project environment in a way that aligns the system.
FIGURE 6-5 Multi-project resource management. ©1991–2010 Avraham Y. Goldratt Institute, LP. All rights reserved.
In a multi-project environment, we start by aligning the system of systems with the