Imagine you have a large program, where you have several teams contributing to the success of one business deliverable. You are all trying to achieve a specific date for release. One team is having trouble. Maybe this is their first missed deliverable. Maybe it’s their second. Maybe they have had trouble meeting their deliverables all
Cost of delay part 1 was about not shipping on time. Cost of delay part 2 was due to multitasking. Cost of delay part 3 was due to indecision. This part is the cost of delay due to technical debt. One of the big problems in backlog management is ranking technical debt stories. It’s even
In Part 1, we discussed the cost of delay of not shipping on time. In Part 2, we discussed the cost of delay of multitasking. In this part, we’ll discuss a cost of delay due to management indecision. Here’s a problem I encounter often. A middle manager calls me, and asks for an estimation workshop.
In Cost of Delay: Not Shipping on Time, Part 1, I introduced you to the notion of cost of delay. I said you could reduce the cost of delay by managing your projects: have shorter projects, using release criteria, or selecting a lifecycle that manages the risk. Sometimes, you don’t have short projects, so projects
Do you know about the Cost of Delay? It’s the way to think about the revenue you can lose plus the cost of continued development. One of my managers many years ago had a back of the napkin approach to cost of delay. “Johanna, we want to ship this product in the second quarter this
The nice folks at ScheduleMailer interviewed me about how I accomplish what I do. They consider me a time management expert. That’s what project portfolio management will do for you. I thought it was funny that one of the questions was about work/life balance. I wanted to say, “Honey, it’s all life.” I managed to
I read Sayonara Sony: How Industrial, MBA-Style Leadership Killed a Once Great Company, and was struck by how the company appeared to make decisions—what will make us the most money now? If you make your project portfolio decisions based on money, estimated cost, you too will have Sony’s problems. This is why cost is the
When I was in Brazil teaching the project portfolio workshop, one of the participants explained that his organization sometimes did a form of gold/silver/bronze comparison among the projects. Here’s how it works. Everyone wrote their project names on stickies. The first cut is everyone self-assigns their projects to Gold, Silver, Bronze categories. That’s right, everyone
I’ve been talking to a variety of potential clients about their project portfolios. One of the big problems is how to see all the work. Some of these folks have multiple kinds of projects, so they want to show their work in a variety of ways. What do you do when you have a few
I’ll be in Sao Paulo, Brazil, teaching project portfolio management, Sept 10-11, 2012. I’ll be teaching in English. I suspect that the class will simulate and interact with each other in Portugese! I’ll be the one who is left out. (That’s what I do when I teach in a non-English speaking country.) We have 5