When my partner and I were driving through the Luxembourg countryside, we enjoyed the beautiful sights: scenic mountains with hilltop castles and lush forests. As night began to fall, the fog descended. At first, it was beautiful. Then visibility became more and more restricted. Relaxation turned into apprehension as we realized the increasing danger on […]
Good Decisions Can’t Be Scored
Too Many Key Decisions or Knowledge Gaps?
Find Your NUDs to Find Your Focus
In the last two years, my thinking about Key Decisions has changed. I used to think that teams needed to address all their high impact / high unknown Key Decisions and that teams could be trusted to come up with the right ones within a few cycles of replanning, even if they struggled during the integration […]
Are Gantt Charts Evil?
In March of 2021, Denmark announced that that they had approved the construction of an artifical island to supply offshore wind power. The island will collect power from offshore wind turbines to transform and transmit it to the Danish electrical grid. The first stage won’t be operational until 2033. A huge project like this will probably have an overall project director, and an army of project managers working on the pieces of the puzzle. Although project management is waste by definition, it is also the epitome of necessary waste for a massive infrastructure project like this.
But this project also has a lot of unknowns. It’s the first time anything like this has been attempted. The group needs solutions that have not yet been invented. If the team attempts to run the entire project with traditional project management tools, they are likely to disappoint. According to researchers at Oxford University, large-scale projects like this have only a 0.2% chance of being delivered on time, on budget with the expected performance.
Advanced R&D Teams Need Pull
On one trip I took prior to the pandemic, I visited an Advanced R&D lab and saw a lot of cool new technology. It was all stuff that I could see myself using some day. The team was working hard to overcome technical obstacles that were in the way of commercialization. These obstacles were real […]
Accelerate Agile Hardware Development with Systematic Knowledge Capitalization
In 2014, Sonion embarked on a journey to accelerate the pace of innovation. Sonion makes tiny microphones, speakers and other components for hearing health and professional audio. The company’s product development cycles are tied to their customers’ development cycles and most products are built to spec for a specific customer. For a company like this, […]