From 100% Over Target to 5 Days Early

A manufacturing company whose average completion times were generally 100% over their goal decided it was time to make improvements.

The company makes highly sophisticated remote sensing devices that prevent catastrophic failure of critical utilities infrastructure around the world. Their product requires mechanical, electrical, firmware, software, telemetry, and environmental ruggedization. In other words, they have a rigorous and challenging design process.

Their planned project durations ranged from four to eighteen months, but it typically took them twice as long to complete a project as they would have liked.

The Challenge

Senior management decided that something had to change, so they asked their Senior Technical Program Manager and Engineering Director to look for ways to make improvements. Fortunately, the program manager had experience with Lean manufacturing, where “visibility” is a cornerstone, so they devised a strategy with three simple steps:

Create visibility
Deliver on time
Increase velocity

The Solution

Fortunately, they found Playbook, where our #1 VOC request is “predictable end dates” and the solution is built on the foundation of “visual work management”.

We led them through our three-week Free Trial process so they could be sure the methods worked in their environment, and they immediately implemented Playbook for their entire R&D team.

1. Create Visibility

Playbook created visibility at multiple levels, each with its own benefit.

Individual team members finally had correct priorities across all their projects. So they didn’t have to multitask.

Project teams conducting their morning standup meetings finally had a kanban board specifically designed for hardware projects. It showed all the common scrum information at a glance (what was completed, what people were working on, and what they would do next), so rather than taking the time to discuss those topics, they could start the meeting with the most important questions:

Who has the critical tasks?
Are they blocked?
Is there anything anyone can do to help?

Project managers finally had status reports that were up to date 24/7. The reports not only showed the real-time status but also showed a confidence score that indicated how out of date the plan was. This eliminated the need for them to track down team members to ask for updates based on memory and approximations.

2. Deliver on Time

Once there was visibility at all levels, they focused on their next goal—delivering on time. They quickly found out their lowest priority project was experiencing two very different delays as a result of the same root cause.

The firmware tasks on the critical path were causing daily slips because the firmware resource was assigned to three projects and had become the critical path on all of them. As a result, the lowest priority project was realizing daily slips and experiencing large setbacks whenever an issue occurred on the first or second priority project. In other words, every delay on the first two projects directly translated to delays on this one as well.

Once they were aware of the root cause and clearly understood the impact, they added another resource to this group and completed the very next project just five days late.

And while it’s quite an improvement to go from 100% over target to only five days late, the company reported they were “a bit disappointed”…

It’s amazing how much your standards change once you can see what is causing every delay, on every project, in real time! ☺️

But they didn’t have to wait long, as they completed their next project four days early.

3. Increase Velocity

Once all the projects were using Playbook, senior management had a portfolio milestone chart that showed the real-time status of every milestone in the company.

This allowed them to require only late-running projects to attend the status meetings, which meant they had more time to work with the projects that did need their help.

They also decided to display the portfolio and individual milestone charts on a large monitor in a common area of the business so everyone could see them. This simple action reinforced the importance of many things to the team:

Management cared about on-time delivery and would step in when needed
Which projects were behind, in case anyone could help
That individual task updates directly affected real-time status reports

The Results

Nine months after the implementation, the engineering director and senior technical program manager shared their perspectives on the impact Playbook made within the company.

Engineering Director

“Prior to the introduction of Playbook into our business, we had no real visibility of the reality of what was happening on a project, and as a result, felt like passengers rather than in control.

Planning (when it happened) was centrally managed by an individual, often a level removed from both the detail and the facts. Management oversight was via monthly reviews, of which plausible excuses and disappointment (sometimes anger) were the dominant themes. We were drifting.

[…]

Fast forward 9 months. Our daily routine has changed. Programs are managed by the individuals doing the work, on a daily basis – they own it. The Engineering Leadership team meets daily for 30 minutes to review the state of the programs, based on the team's daily progress; where necessary, the Leadership facilitates the teams with whatever support is needed to remove roadblocks and recover any slippage. This change has been driven by the insight that Playbook has brought to the realities of the project execution. The buffer chart (for me) is the thing of the greatest value. It allows a day-to-day view on progress…

We are also just starting to look at the project history replay feature, to allow us to root cause slippage and get improvement actions in place for subsequent programs.”

Senior Technical Program Manager

“The impact that Playbook has had on our Technology team has been significant, giving us some structure to our operating rhythm and helping us see waste so we can work to eliminate it.

What this means is:

Better visibility of priorities to individual engineers
Better visibility of the overall progress of projects to management
Ability to respond earlier to issues and problems
Encouraging daily planning with the individual engineers, something that wasn’t happening in the past
Forcing more forward-looking planning, rather than seat-of-the-pants activities and lots of surprises
Encouraging better dialogue within teams about what to do and when to do it
Good record of the activities and milestones in projects

This has led to:

Better planning at all levels of the teams and fewer surprises
Improved velocity delivering NPI programs; they haven’t stopped being late, but we are faster and more efficient
More effective resource allocation across programs and projects
Better ability to cope with the COVID-19 impact as Playbook helps coordinate working from home activities
A framework to drive overall business improvement, where Playbook can feed into their policy deployment plans (helping them with the check and act part of PDCA)”

Summary

Playbook helped this manufacturing company achieve predictable end dates for very complex projects by creating visibility, discovering a systemic root cause, and providing direct benefits to every level of participants.

For more details on this case study and how to read the buffer chart, see this blog.