EMS 02

How Time Gets Wasted During Project Execution

In the last minute we established that to succeed in projects, managers must focus on time efficiency rather than resource efficiency. A natural question is, “how can we squeeze projects for time when it is difficult to meet even current timelines?”

After all, projects are full of uncertainties: work takes longer than planned; technical issues come up; vendors are late; approvals get held up; resources are not available as promised... no matter how painstakingly you plan, you will always get surprises in execution!

However, a closer look reveals that rather than uncertainties themselves, the real problem is how we manage them.

Management Mistake 1: Starting projects ASAP. Project managers compete aggressively for shared resources. They start their project as soon as possible, hoping that it will maximize their chances of securing resources. In reality, the exact opposite happens – resources get spread thin, queues increase and projects take much longer than they should.

Management Mistake 2: Managers treat planning estimates as execution commitments. This means the estimates have to include safety time to account for all the uncertainties. Thus, project plans become longer.

Unfortunately in execution, while most tasks finish on time, almost none of the tasks finish early (a.k.a. Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available). To compound, some tasks still take longer than planned, causing the entire project to still be late! Bottom line: local commitments only prolong the project without significantly increasing on-time delivery.

Management Mistake 3: The absence of good task level priorities in execution. Not knowing what to do and when, resources getting pulled in divergent directions; project managers compound this confusion by pressurizing resources to multitask (work on their tasks without completing other projects’ tasks). Rather than helping, multitasking actually causes all projects to be stalled.

Our experience with over 200 organizations is that 30-50% of the time and capacity in projects are wasted due to traditional management practices. Fortunately, managers no longer need to feel bound by these traditions. The Critical Chain method provides a new set of rules for managing project execution. And that will be the topic of our next minute.