Frequently in engineering and manufacturing environments, there are an uncontrollable number of projects, yet customers demand immediate completion. Teams of hardworking professionals get so far behind that even the simplest of tasks cannot be completed. Lacking the necessary inputs, work is constantly starting and stopping; communications snafus create more delays, causing project lead times to grow exponentially.
The CEO and president of Pinnacle Strategies said that such companies require practical knowledge from a group that knows the way to improve project management process quickly and actually improve the output process.
Increase in output by twenty percent in two months is seldom promised. If rapid output improvement is required, the tool recommended is Rapid Analysis and Bottleneck Improvement Team, RABIT. FMC Technologies and BP are companies that have used the RABIT technique successfully.
“The RABIT process took a stoppage in production and got it moving to its maximum capacity of eight units a month. After five weeks, we had put out the fire and opened the bottleneck. After ten weeks we had changed our focus from multitasking to building a focused process. It took just two-and-a-half months to see major results and success,” remarked Fredrik Glette, Global Manager, MPS Core Components, Subsea Systems, of FMC Technologies.
The RABIT Methodology
Woeppel explanation was that RABIT is derived from company staff. They recruit necessary personnel from all businesses for clients. Highly effective new skills of project management are applied by the new team, under leadership from Pinnacle Strategy consultants. Manufacturers note practical, real workflow improvements.
Rune Thoresen, Global Manager, of FMC Technologies, commented, “The first focus of RABIT was to get the bottlenecked process up and going. The second and third goals were to speed up the process of getting product from vendors then to manufacturing.” The first major success was in bringing the design documentation needed to assist manufacturing from a start time of 240 days to 110 days. These results in cycle time were accomplished in just six weeks. The RABIT process brought structure, methodology, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for long-term success.
Delivery Promises Get Manufacturers in Trouble
Sometimes delivery promises were overly optimistic, requirements not listed properly, or incorrect methodology was applied when job bidding. Customers never believe explanations for delivery promises that are broken. It has already happened.
In many projects, delivery problems go undetected until the end, when there is little time and recovery options are limited. The project fails to deliver on time, or within budget, or the results (or features) promised. The effects of poor project management can be catastrophic for business. Woeppel is emphatic, noting “Sub-standard project management robs a business of its reputation, its customers and its very existence. Failure to achieve key milestones during the engineering phase of a project means that subsequent procurement and construction phases will suffer and be delayed.”
Cases of poor project management.
There are nightmare stories about the costs of poor project management. Some notable examples of project management gone wild:.
The A400M Airlifter of Airbus Military was started in 2007 and completion was expected in 2009. Now estimates place the finish date as 2014 and the budget above estimate by 5 billion dollars.
The original budget for the film Heaven’s Gate was $11.5 million for 12 months of production. It took two years to make and was $32.5 million over budget. The cost over-run caused United Artists to sell to MGM.
Windows Vista by Microsoft Technology was to be released in August 2001, but was not to be until after six more years of programming and millions of dollars in order to have an acceptable working system.
Gran Turismo 2 from Sony Playstation was finally produced 2 years after the announced date of release, it had cost them 80 million dollars.
Wrong kind of MultiTasking.
Multitasking can be bad or good. Good multitasking is effortless ability to keep up with two tasks all at once, like checking your email messages on the way to a meeting. Bad multitasking is when work is dropped halfway to embark on another task, only to then stop and embark on another one or go back to the original one. There are profound implications of project productivity.
Woeppel also acknowledge that people are not often able to complete a task without getting distracted into another one, necessary changes cause the time taken to complete tasks grow. Tasks that would have been completed, end somewhere on the back burner due to unavailable resources. For long estimates, actual time will even grow longer during execution.
A head-in-the-sand approach to curing ailing project management drives many companies into bankruptcy. So does inertia and procrastination. By purposefully developing managers and the processes they use, companies change the very core of how things are done; facilitating real, focused improvements in many different parts of the organisation.
This is not a hypothetical approach; only benefits of real world matter.
RABIT has irrefutable solutions like data that substantiate reduction in lead times by 28 percent and output increase by a factor of 2. Swift changes are necessary; Six Sigma methodology is long and takes years for improvements in productivity to be noted; RABIT has a 0.2 guaranteed increase in output in just 2 months. Improvement in focus, communication, collaboration and project prioritisation creates a best practice culture. Motivated employees and satisfied customers hold the key to the final result.
When there is a necessity to learn about project management consulting, you can view related website for more info. Check out this homepage about visual project management methodology by clicking on http://pinnacle-strategies.com/ now.