Page 208 - The Six Sigma Project Planner

+
+
10 20 30 60
= = 20 weeks
3 3
The average doesn’t tell the whole story, either. The benefits will begin as soon as a
project is completed; by the end of the 30-week period, project A will have been
completed for 20 weeks and project B for 10 weeks.
Now let’s consider a multitasking strategy. Here we split our time equally among the
three projects in a given 10-week period. That way the sponsor of projects B and C will
see activity on their projects much sooner than if we used a single-task approach to
scheduling. The new schedule looks like this:

A B C A B C A B C

With this multitasking schedule, project A will be completed in 23.3 weeks, project B in
26.7 weeks, and project C will still take 30 weeks. The completion time for project A
went from 10 weeks to 23.3 weeks, for project B it went from 20 weeks to 26.7 weeks,
and for project C it remained the same, 30 weeks. The overall average completion time
went from 20 weeks to 26.67 weeks, a 33% deterioration in average time to complete.
And this is a best-case scenario. In real life, there is always some lost time when making
the transition from one project to another. The Black Belt has to switch gears, review the
next project, get the proper files ready, reawaken sponsors and team members, and so
on. This can often take considerable time, which is added to the time needed to
complete the projects.

Critical Chain Project Portfolio Management
Critical chain project management avoids the multitasking problem by changing the
way the organization manages groups of projects and the way the individual projects
are managed.

Managing the Organization’s Projects
First, at the organizational level, multitasking of key resources is stopped. People and
other resources are allowed to focus on projects one at a time. This means that
management must accept responsibility for prioritizing projects and policies must be
developed that mandate single-project focus and discourage multitasking. To be
successful, the organization must determine its capacity to complete projects. Every
organization has more opportunities than it can successfully pursue with finite
resources. This means that only a select portfolio of projects should be undertaken in
any time interval. The constraining resource is usually a key position in the
organization, such as the time available by project sponsors, engineers, programmers,
etc. This information can be used to determine organizational capacity and to schedule
project start dates according to the availability of the key resource. This is called project
launch synchronization and the scarce resource that paces the project system is called a
synchronizer resource.

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