Recently read this great book on project management. It's a novel that revoles around four exec MBA students that need to rapidly speed up their projects and their professor who is desperately seeking tenure.
Here are the main points that stayed with me after reading the book:
- Uncertainty causes project delays
- Focus is the one key thing for PMs. They lose it by starting everything at once
- Progress reports push project managers off critical path. How? Focus on everything not most important things
- Delays are the biggest financial impact by far
- Got to see reality ie MBAs aren’t needed for recruiting anymore
- Early/on-time projects aren’t rewarded enough
- Everybody puts in lots of slack re their projects – safety
- The lower down people are the more they blame internally
- Don’t use cheap vendors to make a small % cost saving – delays will cost you so much more
- Use of buffers: project, feeder & resource
- Sort out bottlenecks -> weakest link in project first
- Control cost and protect throughput
- Focus on the weakest part – sort out the bottleneck
- Keep strengething until the weakest link changes
- Wrong metrics drive completely the wrong behaviours
- Resource contention – creates the critical chain where critical path based on resources that are the bottleneck. ToC – Theory of Constraints
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