Indications of lacking planning efficacy - 3/7: "During a team meeting the past is discussed in stead of the future".

On April 19th I wrote an article about the first indication of lacking planning efficacy, on May 2nd number two and today number three. Very often in a team meeting the project manager asks all members to elaborate on challenges of past weeks. This approach does not only take a lot of time of all specialists, but also takes away the possibility to present the upcoming critical path activities for the complete team.

If your team consists of 8 members and all of them take 5 minutes to elaborate, the total time spent is 8x5x8 = 200 minutes. I believe it's more efficient to discuss 'lessons learned' in smaller groups. What is important and often forgotten, is to present the upcoming critical path to all team members. If all of them are aware which report or analysis is critical, it is often possible to limit the duration of that activity. In large organisation SOPs are written on default turn-around times, but those times are far larger than the time that's actual needed to complete the activity itself.

Most team members also appreciate the freedom of planning their own activities. This is no issue at all if the project manager has an up-to-date plan with the float of each activity towards the milestones (or critical path which should be the same as a milestone shouldn't have float). And that is our core business. Let FloatControl help you and get happier team members as well. [email protected], +(0)6 83 44 7080.