Your team is struggling to meet project deadlines. How can you improve communication to keep things on track?

To improve communication and keep the team on track with project deadlines, start by establishing clear, concise goals and timelines. Implement regular check-ins, such as daily stand-ups or weekly progress meetings, to monitor progress and address roadblocks early. Use collaborative tools like project management software to track tasks, deadlines, and responsibilities. Encourage open communication by creating an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing updates, concerns, or asking for help. Foster accountability by setting clear expectations for each team member and ensure that important information is centralized and easily accessible to everyone.

Hold a meeting with the team to be very clear on each person's ACCOUNTABILITIES. Accountabilities are not the same as responsibilities. A member might be responsible for conducting the final QC, but she may not be the person accountable for on-time delivery -- that should be the production manager. Establishing clear accountabilities for roles will ensure there are no gaps with the critical roles that must take place to meet deadlines. Once accountabilities are clear, communications can flow easier because everyone will know who to speak to when issues arise that might compromise delivery dates.

Streamlining the communication process is a lean practice that reduces "extra processing." In this case, ineffective communication is an overhead that just add delays rather than improve them. Consider 10 minute standup meetings where issues are brought to the table without discussion. Take the issues to an offline meeting with the critical people to dive in and resolve. Consider building a dashboard display to show important metrics that measure on-time delivery so they are transparent to the operations team. Any sports game without a score board is confusing. An operations team running without a dashboard cannot win without knowing their score.

Establish a regular meeting cadence that takes place daily or weekly. Hold 10 minute standup meetings but refrain from detailed discussions -- take the issues offline with a focused group after the standup. Having regular meeting may seem to be counter productive at first, but problems will go away. Productivity and morale will start to increase. Late shipments will decrease.

God gave us two ears and one mouth to listen more than we speak. Listen to the production team. Listen to the working staff. Do Gemba walks with the staff. Hold Kaizen events. These are all effective tools and techniques to gather feedback.