Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Project World 2006 - Nov 6-9
I won’t be at TOCICO in Miami this year. I’ve accepted the opportunity to speak at a much bigger conference on the same week, Project World in Orlando Florida, November 6-9.
I’ll be giving two talks. Here are the abstracts…
Who’s Managing Lunch and other prarables of Lean Project Management
We manage projects in our everyday lives all the time. We evaluate risks. We balance costs versus benefits. We understand uncertainty and variation and buffer our schedules around it. And we recognize when things aren’t projects and need a different kind of management. Is buying the groceries a project or an inventory management problem? We think of our ability to do all this as common sense. But often we leave that common sense checked in our car when we arrive at the office in the morning. Japanese Lean manufacturing techniques and the agile software development community have been capturing some of the that common sense, codifying it and building in to everyday working practices. David Anderson will discuss with some commonplace everyday examples how to build Lean and Agile ideas in to your project management practices.
W. Edwards Deming taught the Japanese World class manufacturing, how might he have thought about project management?
Traditional project management success is measured as conformance against plan. W. Edwards Deming taught that conformance to process and his System of Profound Knowledge were preferable to conformance to plan or specification. He believed that focusing on process, productivity and variation created a culture of continuous improvement and ultimately led to better economic results, whilst conformance to plan encouraged heroic effort and a lack of repeatability. Deming’s work is widely admired and implemented in manufacturing and production processes. How might it be adopted into the project management body of knowledge and how would it affect the way we manage and run projects? David Anderson has adopted Deming’s thinking into his work on project management and the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration. This talk will explain how conformance to process is reconciled with iterative project planning, tracking and reporting and how project managers can avoid making what Deming called Mistake #1 (tampering) and Mistake #2 (not intervening when appropriate to do so). Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, TOC, Lean, Project+World