One of my current projects is undergoing something I’ve not come across, at least not on this scale – scope being reduced to match the time available. I’ve heard that such a thing exists, but have never actually encountered it in the wild.
One of the predecessor events I was waiting for to complete slid a number of weeks, in a project that had no additional float time. To make the nominal non-negotiable finish date I had to my part of the project (restoration). I went to the sponsor and program manager, made my case to take some items off the deliverable list and was told “OK, show me what you have to do to make the date”
While setting the scope I included a few ground rules and assumptions for the sponsor to sign off on. It contained he usual roles, responsibilities, reporting structure and so on. One ground rule was that we had zero float and a late start would mean a late finish.
I do know my sponsor is smart enough to understand that with a fixed end date and a late start something had to be given up to pull the overall program to the left.
The project team had done a very through job during the scope and planning parts of the project, we were confident that we had the deliverable very well understood, identified the risks and felt our work breakdown structure was both accurate and realistic. It helped that we had time to be very thorough in our preparation for the project and had visibility early on that the predecessor events were starting to slide.
By tracking the predecessor events we knew a couple of weeks before the meeting with the program manager that we would be pressured to compress and were able to identify some possible options.
To begin the “what if” process we made a thorough requirement analysis. We took into consideration what was essential and got the program managers involved by prioritizing the deliverables. Understood the short-term and long-term program requirements and see how we could reduce the duration and still address them effectively and efficiently.
Once we had some initial thoughts and rough compression estimates we engaged the subject matter experts (commodity owners and factory mechanics) and ran various scenarios past them. These are the people who understand the nuts and bolts of what we were doing and were invaluable in finding additional efficiencies. Through a combination of combining similar operations, eliminating duplicate inspections, reducing set up time (30% of the time savings) and finally eliminating a number of the “not as vital as other things” (70% of the time savings) we were able to cut our flow enough to meet the project date. Again there is no float an should the .
When the WBS is created we never dug down to understand the individual jobs as a team. We rely upon the SME’s that understand their product and to give real world detailed work statements that are fed into the WBS. We had taken each commodity individually and flowed through. We had never taken the time to break the jobs down to individual operations and look for duplicate work and inspections at that level.
The biggest leson learnt is clearly that when we need to compress we can go in and get into the details and probably find a saving. The question we need to ask, is it worth the project team going to that level of detail for maybe 3-5% flow savings? And I’m still thinking about how to quantify that.