Twice the Scope, Half the Time…!

A very large aerospace company had to upgrade their Enterprise PLM system. They had done the same thing before, and due to the high number of customizations, it had taken two years to complete. The problem was, the scope of the project had doubled since the last time—more software, more data, more users and more customizations. The prospect of it taking more time than the last time was unacceptable…

Fortunately, the CIO was a fan of Lean and hired the Playbook founders to show them how to run this project using the Lean and Agile Playbook methods on manual project boards. The results couldn’t have been better. Instead of taking longer, the entire project was completed in 10 months—even though the scope was twice as large as the time before when it had taken two years to complete.

"There was added expense of hiring technical services and training our team in the methods used. But conservatively, the savings from the reduced project time paid for this expense within three to four months—at least a 300% ROI."

                                                             –CIO

When asked to explain the results, they listed these as the top benefits of Playbook.

• "People know, every day, what their most important task is
• People know, every day, what their next task is
• People know what they are waiting for (if they are waiting)
• PM knows months ahead of time that the end dates are changing and why
• Information handoff is faster
• Resources in both departments are freed up months earlier
• In many cases, the resources are working fewer hours on this project than they did on the last similar project, which was smaller
• If we lose the critical resource for their allotted time one day, it extends the schedule one day
• If a single critical resource is not able to work the project for one week, the end date will go out one week
• If we could double the capacity, or availability, of all the resources, the schedule could be cut approximately in half. Cost is the same."

Same cost, shorter schedule, future flexible resources.

As a result, the team won their company's well-deserved Chairmans Award for this project.

If you would like to see more details on this case study, read this blog.