Dave's random mumblings…

“The clubs welcomed the additional input into an ongoing process. However, they were of the opinion that bringing Celtic and Rangers into any form of Premier League set-up was not desirable or viable.”

So said the Premier League today.

Of the 20 Premier League clubs 14 voted against the proposal for Celtic and Rangers to join the League. I’m going to guess the only clubs in favour were those who felt happy they were not going to be relegated any time soon (United, City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and some other delusional former big club, maybe Totenham or Everton) and were not worried about loosing two places to the Scottish sides in a 36 team Premier-1 and -2.

Ultimately at the beginning of any year 10 or 12 clubs start the season with avoiding relegation to the Championship and the loss of Premiership money as job #1.

It seems that clubs have one chance in the lower division to come up before the combination of premier wage bill and Championship TV money (aided by the Premier League parachute payment) forces them to cut costs and compete on a more even footing.

Leeds, Coventry City, Leicester, both Sheffield sides, Reading and Ipswich have all fallen into this particular hole. Newcastle and West Brom seem to be taking this first year opportunity sitting in first and second with a little space between them and the rest. The third club relegated last year was Middlesborough, are they are just a couple of points out of the playoff picture.

The idea of Premier-2 remains alive. This has been talked about for a while and formally proposed by Bolton chairman Phil Gartside as a way to spread the TV money around, get a little more parity and reduce the spending gap between the elite and the rest.

If Premier-1 and -2 were to come into existence today Coventry City would be the 37^th placed club.

Another thing that I found interesting was no discussion of promotion/relegation with the Football League (current Championship, League 1 and League 2) that I could find. As they are a separate body anyway, there would be nothing to stop Premier-1 and -2 becoming a closed shop totally outside the Football League pyramid. If this were to happen it would be a change far bigger than bringing the two Scottish giants into the league.

Incidentally the TV money is astounding, the Premier League domestic TV and foreign TV deals combined are worth a little under $5 billion (yes billion) in round numbers. To put this into perspective this is more than Major League Baseball ($430 million/year), the National Football League ($3 billion/year) and the National Basketball Association ($920 million/year) combined.

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.

I spent some time recently reviewing the Value Stream Maps of a couple of processes and identifying the steps that the customer (the production floor) really cares about and those that don’t add value.

Here are my thoughts after identifying a number of steps that don’t add value to the customer, but are still essential part of the process.

Non-Value Added (NVA) – any activity that is not required by the business or the customer willing to pay for. The NVA list is extensive and includes storing, moving, reworking, obtaining multiple approvals or signatures for the product. As I said the list is extensive.

Value added activities can be divided up into two categories -

Customer Value Added (CVA) – this is the stuff the customer cares about, turning aluminium into airplanes, writing code and adding functions that provide additional features that the end user cares about. If the activity changes the form, fit, function, interchangeability or adds a feature then it probably adds value to the customer. Additionally any work we do that provides a competitive advantage, for example eliminating defects, reducing price or reduction in flow time, falls under this category.

Process Value Added (PVA) – activity or expense that is required to operate the business and the customer does not care about. There are a considerable number of tasks that are required (or even essential to the process not breaking down) but don’t add anything to the product.

It’s obviously important to eliminate NVA activities. There is inevitably some low hanging fruit that’s easy to remove, however it’s important to delve deeply into the process and really understand what each step in the process adds and eliminate all NVA tasks and steps.

Recognising PVA and separating them from the NVA can be difficult. You are required (by law or by some form of regulatory body) to perform there steps, but they don’t add anything to the product. First step is to confirm the step is required, then look a little close of see if it’s performed as efficiently as possible, this may require contacting a subject matter expert to really understand. Ideally you’d like to eliminate PVA, but that’s typically impossible for a true PVA step. Then you are required to ensure the cost of these steps is reduced as far as possible.