Speed Up the Project Process When Necessary?

¶ … speed up the project process when necessary?

One of the most expensive strategies that large-scale enterprises rely on to speed up a project process when necessary is adding additional resources in the form of larger project tams and additional headcount. This strategy rarely works as there is a learning curve, an exponentially higher level of cooperation and collaboration needed across project teams, and greater levels of orchestration of new resources added (Brown, Hyer, 2010). Just addressing one of the dimensions of a project's constraints will not help to speed up a project with any degree of certainty of reliability. What is needed is a shift in two or more dimensions of a project's constraints. Crashing, or adding additional resources to a specific task, not project wide, helps to shorten the learning cycle and increase project focus (Brown, Hyer, 2010). This is in contract to en masse additions of staff across an entire project that often don't scale and deliver value over time.

A second tool for accelerating a project is fast tracking. This is accomplished when there are a series of sequentially related tasks that are scheduled to happen concurrently (Brown, Hyer, 2010). A third strategy is to delay some activities and reallocate resource expenditures while taking advantage of available float to balance existing project requirements will concentrating on the schedule reduction sought (Brown, Hyer, 2010). A fourth strategy is to reduce the scope of the project to the WBS level of a project, thereby creating more slack time across the entire project an alleviating any resource conflicts that are causing the project to slow down.

What is the "crashing" procedure? Use an example from your own project experience to help identify the steps.

The crashing procedure concentrates on adding resources to reduce the time required for selected project tasks (Brown, Hyer, 2010). One of the most common and cited in the book is when a project manager for a software project hires more programmers and attempts to short the time to complete a given task by a month (Brown, Hyer, 2010). Crashing is a challenging strategy in reality however as the skill set of the experts brought in to accelerate a project often doesn't match with the unique needs of a project. In smaller projects where the skill set of programming in a specific language is relatively rare, crashing has an immediate positive effect as the extra engineers also bring incrementally greater knowledge as well.

Crashing is most commonplace on projects that can scale quickly when additional expertise is added. This includes application software development, web application development and testing, cloud computing platform development, and many aspects of engineering-centric projects. Where crashing doesn't pay off is on projects that require exceptional amounts of manual labor and energy that doesn't scale well if at all across a very large-scale project. Adding a team of experienced engineers can accelerate a new software application development project through the infusion of knowledge, yet adding in more teams of construction workers to a large-scale building project will not scale nearly as quickly as the nature of the latter project is constrained by a series of sequential tasks. Knowledge and expertise scales faster when a crashing strategy is used on projects, which makes them preferred in software and engineering-centric development projects.

What are the possible project costs that need to be considered when analyzing a project trade off?

Project costs emanate from quality, resources, scope and time constraints and force a tradeoff of each in choosing to reduce project costs or accelerate them over time. Each of these areas have specific project costs that need to be optimized to specific project constraints. Cost of quality dominates complex manufacturing industries including aerospace and defense (A&D) that relies on calculations of the cost of good and bad quality to determine how their overall production process is functioning. The text makes reference to the costs of quality in the context of commercial aviation production (Brown, Hyer, 2010). Minimizing the costs of bad quality while accelerating the costs of good quality is what production and quality managers strive to accomplish while keeping projects within scope and on time. In highly complex, regulated industries the tradeoff between quality and time is made on nearly every large-scale project as time and resource constraints often force trade-offs overall (Brown, Hyer, 2010). In industries where time-to-market is critical, as is the case in retailing for example, the cost tradeoffs of resources, quality and scope are often optimized to meet a specific market window. An example is the launch of a fall or winter clothing line where a manufacturer chooses to focus only on the highest quality segments possible and reduce spending on secondary or tertiary lines that don't deliver profits and also lead to borderline profitability.

What is the critical chain concept? Why are buffers an important part of keeping the critical chain protected?

The critical chain concept defines how associates time is used both within their own department and across cross-functional teams as well (Brown, Hyer, 2010). It is becoming increasingly commonplace for organizations to allow a certain percentage of an employee's time to be used in cross-functional, collaborative projects that benefit the entire company. Matrix-based organizational structures are driving the critical chain concept of greater levels of popularity given the headcount limits or ceilings companies often put into place.