Indication of lacking planning efficacy - 6/7: "multi-tasking"
Stijn Muller, BSc, BaSc
Project planning for pharma & infra projects. IPMA-PMO certified, 25 yrs experience, MSProject, Primavera, custom-made tools. I ensure that your team understands the planning & is able to take the appropriate actions.
In earlier posts I've mentioned 5 other indications which happen frequently and which all impact your planning efficacy ("unexpected" delays, a projectmanager that doesn't want to share the float to the team, teammeetings discussion past in stead of future, not knowing the float, outsource to a CRO and using their resource-driven schedule). You can find the articles via my LinkedIn page. Today's article is inspired by a presentation I just witnessed via ZOOM.
A company was able to shorten the development of an anti-virus candidate by 10-fold: from 10 years to 1 year. Planning was a major part of reaching this goal - and I'm sure all of the indications mentioned were mitigated. Also the 7th one (next article): installing a proper progress routine. This company analyzed the critical path daily (or even more often), all team members were aware of the urgency of the program, discussions were efficient and minimized, more than normal business risk was taken, people were working overtime and there was no multi-tasking. I am convinced that - with regular working hours and regular business risk - the development could still be in 3-4 years in stead of 10 by recognizing the power of proper planning within the organization and embedding the planning knowledge in a PMO.
It makes sense that working simultaneously on two projects where one has float leads to a delayed project: if the float was used by starting later both end dates would be met. This resource has two weeks of work per project. The yellow project has two weeks of float and could finish week 4 without delaying the program. Project 2 is on the critical path.
What if no project has float? In that case the project should be ranked on company's priority. Sounds reasonable I hope. If so, do you understand why most companies work with default turn-around time for projects and that it is required to work on more projects simultaneously?
FloatControl is specialized in planning management for biotech & life sciences. www.floatcontrol.com - [email protected] - +(0)6 83 44 7080.