A Lean A3 is a project summary on a page. It tells the story of your change, improvement or project from the time it is just an idea all the way through to delivery and implementing the change. It also shows the main people involved, the data and reasons for the improvement, and a high level schedule for making the improvement.
It follows the “Deming Cycle”, of Plan, Do, Check, and Act (or Adjust). Check out the video to create your own PDCA Lean A3 in PowerPoint below!
Step 1
First create the heading area, by Inserting a Square shape, and colouring it grey.
Place two tables over the heading area, both without a “header” and unchecking banded rows. Turn these into our people and schedule list.
Step Two
Create seven more squares underneath this as our plank PDCA template,which will include the seven problem solving steps of a Lean PDCA A3. These are:
Define the problem
Grasp the current situation
Plan
Do
Check
Act (or Adjust)
Lessons Learned
Step 3
Now we can fill in the Lean A3. For each step:
Gather data and the “Gap” between where you are and where you want to be
Use Value Stream Maps, process maps, Pareto charts, Fishbone diagrams to grasp the current situation and potential root causes
Create an action plan based on the root causes, assign actions to people and give due dates.
Show the schedules and actions in progress using a Gantt chart or Kanban board.
Check your measures – what were you aiming for, and what was achieved?
Update the Standard Operation Process (SOP) with the new process
Perform a project Post-mortem, Retrospective, and gather lessons from the project.
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Below you will find videos on all the Project Communications Management sections from the PMBOK Guide.
If you want to see the “Key Concepts & Tools” for Project Communications Management, click here. Enjoy!
Project Communications Management Overview
Plan Communication Management
Manage Communications
Monitor Communication
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Well done for improving your knowledge on Project Management! If you want to see the “Key Concepts & Tools” for Project Cost Management, click here. Enjoy!
Below you will find videos on all the Project Schedule Management sections from the PMBOK Guide.
If you want to see the “Key Concepts & Tools” for Project Schedule Management, click here. Enjoy!
Project Schedule Management – Overview
Plan Schedule Management
Define Activities
Sequence Activities
Estimate Activity Durations
Develop Schedule
Control Schedule
Well done for improving your knowledge on Project Management! If you want to see the “Key Concepts & Tools” for Project Schedule Management, click here. Enjoy!
Below you will find videos on all the Project Integration Management sections from the PMBOK Guide.
If you want to see the “Key Concepts & Tools” for Project Integration Management, click here. Enjoy!
01 – Project Integration Management
Overview
Develop Project Charter
Develop Project Management Plan
Direct and Manage the Project Work
Manage Project Knowledge
Monitor and Control Project Work
Perform Change Control
Close Project or Phase
Well done for improving your knowledge on Project Management! If you want to see the “Key Concepts & Tools” for Project Integration Management, click here. Enjoy!
What happens if we want to compress our schedule? Maybe it’s going to take a long time and we want to make it shorter – that’s where schedule compression techniques come into play.
Schedule compression is a technique that’s used to shorten or accelerate the schedule duration without reducing the project scope. We still want to deliver what we are delivering – that business value as part of our project – but we might have certain schedule constraints, imposed dates that we need to meet or other schedule objectives. So we need to compress that schedule.
There are two main compression techniques that you’ll see on the PMP exam and in the Project Management Body of Knowledge, and even in your project management career. Those two are “crashing” the schedule, which shortens the schedule duration by adding resources. That can be very costly as we’re adding more people or things. The other one we’re looking at is fast tracking, where activities or phases normally done in sequence are now performed in parallel or at the same time for at least a portion of their duration. That way we’re able to cut back on the time frame.
Let’s look at a few examples.
Crashing might involve approving over-time, adding resources, paying to expedite the delivery of activities on the critical path. Of course because of that crashing may result in increased risk, and certainly an increased cost.
As an example up the top here we’ve got Task 1, Task 2, Task 3 as our normal schedule with just one person assigned to each. But if we’re crashing this project schedule we’re adding resources to it, so now all of a sudden we’ve got a lot more resources there and we’re able to shorten the time of that task.
You have to be aware of the law of diminishing returns here, where sometimes adding more and more people -your return on that investment will get less and less over time. Sometimes adding more people isn’t the answer. But in this case, when we’re crashing a project we’re looking for that to be the answer to reduce our project schedule.
The other one is fast tracking, where we’re performing tasks in parallel. Again this might result in rework and an increased risk and cost, and it only works when activities can be overlapped to happen at the same time, to shorten the project duration on the critical path. We’re using the lead time, if there’s any lead time that we can take up we’re using that to perform those tasks in parallel. For example one, two, three in sequence but now one, two, three we’re performing some of these activities at the same time by fast tracking our project. Because we’re able to do that we don’t have to add more resources in this case, so the cost is a little bit less than if we were to crash the project with project resources. And that is the idea of schedule compression, crashing your schedule and fast tracking your schedule.
You will definitely see project estimating techniques mentioned as part of the PMP exam, so it’s good to know the four main different types and the differences between them.
Throughout your project you’ll be asked to make those estimations of future performance, and that could be in your Schedule, it could be in the Cost of the project, it could even be in the quality of your project. The four main methods that you will come across as part of the PMBOK guide are:
Parametric estimating
Bottom up estimating
Analogous estimating, and;
3-point estimating.
They might sound a little bit funny at first, so let’s go into them in more detail.
First of all we’ve got parametric estimating. This is where we’re actually using a parameter to estimate per item. So it’s a simple parameter, for example 55 meters or $55 per square meter or square foot. We might have a thousand dollars per roll of metal, or twenty days per delivery in our schedule for example, where it might take to get something to another country. We might be looking at two-week sprints per each feature that we’re delivering in a software project, or a team might take an eight-hour workshop to complete a risk assessment. All of these are parameters that we might assign to the activities so that we can estimate for those activities.
Next up we’ve got bottom up estimating. This is where we’re estimating project resources by assigning a value to the lower-level components of the Work Breakdown Structure. We’re starting from the bottom and we’re working our way up. And when we say the bottom we mean the the lower level tasks that have been assigned to our teams. Now these of course go up in the work breakdown structure to the larger tasks or features, and then to an overall delivered feature (and this is where we start getting into Agile potentially or Feature Driven Development) but the idea of that is that this team can estimate on their piece of work, this team can estimate on their piece of work or their single task or one or two tasks, and that might be say $10,000, this one might be $20,000, this one might be $5,000, and then we take all of those items and we bring them up into the feature so the total there could be $50,000 and then the total for the overall feature could be $100,000 for example. But the key is that we’re starting at the very lowest level of the activity, we’re starting from the bottom.
Next up we have Analogous estimating. This is where we’re finding an analogy, something similar to what we’re currently doing. We’re estimating the duration or cost of an activity or a project using historical data from a similar activity or a similar project. Of course this is frequently used to estimate project duration when there is a limited amount of detailed information, so we haven’t gotten down into the Work Breakdown Structure yet at the team level, we only have a really high-level idea. Using Analogous Estimating we can get a rough idea of how much it will cost, or how long it will take by looking at another similar project. It’s like an analogy, it’s similar to what we’re currently doing. Generally it’s less costly and less time-consuming than our other techniques, but also it is less accurate because we’re not really delving into the detail.
Last but not least there is 3-point estimating. This uses an average of three points – we might have the Optimistic estimate, the Pessimistic estimate, and the Most Likely estimate. The way that we end up working it out is: Let’s say our Optimistic schedule (O) is five days, our Most Likely (M) is seven days and then our Pessimistic (P) is ten days. We add each of them together and then we divide that by three, and that gives us the answer.
In fact here’s a better version that doesn’t take as much math or any decimals – let’s say we’ve got five, nine and ten divided by three – because 24 is a nice round number – we divide that by three and we get eight. And that’s how we do three-point estimating.
You might see a variation of this which is “Beta” or “PERT” (Program Evaluation Review Technique), where we’ve got Optimistic, then four times the most likely, and then our pessimistic as well, all divided by six instead.
And those are the project estimating techniques we will come across in the PMP Exam.
Project Schedule Compression Techniques