Stepping outside the process world

Just took part as a non-advocate review of after action review for a pure development engineering project that a friend of mine is delivering this afternoon. My projects have typically impacted operations and the factory, I don’t see development projects very often and it was fun to look at something new and be a neutral in the room reviewing the material I don’t have to deliver.

I noticed a few major differences in approach that may have value for my projects in the future.

Identify the primary requirements, in the example today that was three aspects of the deliverable, these were frozen and were off limits to change unless the revision was essential and had been through a formal process of reviews and approvals. I liked this, managing change is always an issue that takes inordinate amounts of time. While putting certain aspects of the deliverable out of bounds does require additional work during the define and charter phase, over the course of the project it pays dividends over the life of a project.

Integrating the concept of “fit, form, function, interchangeability and safety” into the change management process. I spent many years as a manufacturing engineer in a part number controlled world where revising any of the above requires a part number roll (-1 to -2). For production projects if a change in the deliverable (process, flow or physical part) casuses any changes to fit, form, function, interchangeability or safety then the project charter must be rolled to reflect the new “part number”.

Finally the deliverable was defined in the charter not only by physical properties and functionality, but also in how they would be inspected and measured. This avoids problems where an item passes shipping inspection, but is held for receiving inspection because of drawing interpretation or methodology. For a deliverables that reduces flow time, this would require the flow reduction measurement (touch time, wait time, end-to-end flow time or batch size) methodology to be agreed upon and documented up front.

The biggest takeaway was reinforcement of what I already believe; it all comes down to a watertight charter as the base the project is built on, no matter what the deliverable. Again I see a couple of new ways to really make it more comprehensive with out huge amounts of additional time being added to the charting process.

I enjoy taking part in looking at projects outside my usual realm. I typically get to look at something new or cool, and that makes my inner geek happy, but I also get to see how other organizations do things differently, see better ways of doing something and pick up new ideas to help my own projects.