Supply Chain Management For Dummies. Daniel Stanton

may not get to stop working on other things; they may be working on several projects. If one of the other projects requires more time and attention, you must make sure that your project gets enough support to avoid getting into trouble. Anticipate potential problems so that you can make formal arrangements. You might make an agreement with the team member’s boss to ensure that your project has priority, for example. Or perhaps the team member’s boss may commit a certain number of hours each week to your project.

      Creating cross-functional project plans

One of the best ways to deal with the challenge of leading a cross-functional project is to have a solid project plan. Building the plan gives everyone a chance to provide input and catch interdependencies. Human resources, for example, may not be able to start training employees in a new process until the necessary equipment has been delivered and installed. An integrated, cross-functional project plan makes it easy to see these connections and provides a clearer picture of the time required to complete a project. Creating an integrated plan also provides a natural opportunity for anyone on the team to ask for clarification on unusual words or jargon.

      You can use many approaches to build an integrated project plan, but the following system works best for me:

      1 Bring representatives from all the necessary functions together for a planning meeting.Representatives may include people from logistics, operations, information technology, human resources, and accounting.

      2 Ask the team to come up with a list of deliverables.Deliverables are clearly defined results that the project must produce. To tell whether a deliverable is a good one, use the Done/Not Done test. You should be able to ask whether a deliverable is done or not. The answer shouldn’t be “Almost,” “Mostly,” or “It’s 64.67 percent done.” The answer should be “Yes, it’s done” or “No, it’s not done.”

      3 Ask the team to create ten tasks for each deliverable.You might ask the team members, “If you were to summarize what it takes to complete this deliverable in 10 steps, what would those steps be?” Each step is a task. A structured list of tasks, like the one in Figure 4-3, is called a work breakdown structure (WBS). I prefer that deliverables and tasks start with verbs, which makes it easy to tell what needs to be done. “Design receiving process” is more descriptive than simply “Receiving process,” for example.FIGURE 4-3: Sample work breakdown structure.

      4 Ask the team to decide which tasks have to be completed before another task can begin.Relationships among tasks are called dependencies. The task that needs to happen first is called a predecessor. The task that has to wait is called a successor. For small, simple projects, you may be able to track dependencies manually, but in most supply chain projects, the dependencies make the projects complicated. Figure 4-4 shows a network diagram that illustrates the predecessor and successor relationships between tasks. Using project management software to track tasks and dependencies can help you avoid mistakes and save a lot of time.FIGURE 4-4: Sample network diagram.

      5 Evaluate the timeline, and crash the plan.Dependencies often mean that it takes longer to complete a project than anyone expected or considered to be reasonable. At that point, you need to look for logical ways to shorten the timeline. This process is called crashing or compressing the project plan.Start by looking at the tasks that are driving your schedule — the ones that are taking the longest time to complete. The longest series of tasks is called the critical path. The only way to shorten a project is to change the tasks on the critical path. Perhaps some tasks don’t need to occur in sequence or in series. Instead, those tasks could run at the same time or in parallel, or they could be independent of one another. Continue analyzing the tasks on the critical path until you have a timeline that seems reasonable to the team and to your sponsor. Creating a list of project deliverables and tasks is relatively easy and can be done with a word processing or spreadsheet program, but calculating project timelines and the critical path is cumbersome work. Project management software does this work automatically, which saves a lot of time when you’re crashing or revising a project plan.

      Creating a RACI matrix

      When lots of people are working on a project, they often have different opinions about their roles and responsibilities. You need to establish a clear understanding of what everyone is doing to make sure that all the tasks are completed. It’s much easier to set expectations up front than to confront misunderstandings later on.

      For any task in a project, a team member can have four roles:

       Responsible: The team member is responsible for helping to complete a task. If the task requires someone to do work or make a decision, that person is responsible for working on that task until it’s complete.

       Accountable: The team member is the only person who is ultimately accountable for getting the task done. The accountable owner may need to make the decisions and do the work. Or she may need to prod and poke her team members to do the work. When it comes time to ask “Is this task complete?” the accountable owner is the person whose career and credibility are on the line.

       Consult: The team member should be asked to provide input for a task, but he isn’t the one doing the task, and he isn’t making decisions.

       Inform: The team member needs to be notified that a task is occurring or that it has been completed.

      Assigning people to these four roles makes it easier to communicate what each team member has to do for your project to be successful. You can document the roles with a RACI matrix (Responsible – Accountable – Consult – Inform, pronounced race see).

Using a RACI matrix like the one in Figure 4-5, you list all the tasks in your project and define the role for each of your team members in supporting each task. If there is disagreement about someone’s role on a task, you have a chance to resolve it on paper before it creates a problem for your project. Read horizontally, a RACI matrix makes it very easy for the project manager to know who needs to be involved for each task to get done. Read vertically, a RACI matrix shows each person’s role and tasks.

      

It can be hard to convince team members that only one person should be accountable for every task. I’ve found, however, that when more than one person is accountable, it’s more difficult to manage the project. If two people insist that they’re both accountable for a task, consider breaking that task into two smaller tasks and making each person accountable for one of these two tasks.

      FIGURE 4-5: Sample RACI matrix.

      Designing project scorecards

      Tracking the progress of a project is the key to figuring out what’s working, what’s not working, and where you need to focus resources to keep a project on track. One of the most effective ways to track a project is to use a scorecard and update it on a regular basis. For most projects, I recommend doing weekly updates at the same time every week; for slower-moving projects, monthly or quarterly updates are fine. In some cases, things change so fast that you need daily or even hourly updates.

      The project scorecard should make it easy for anyone to tell at a glance how a project is doing — whether it’s ahead of schedule and under budget or behind schedule and over budget; whether things are going as planned, or whether unplanned risks are putting the project in jeopardy. Following are the items I like to include in a scorecard and update every week: