[div style=”margin-bottom:-20px;”] [/div][spacer size=”10″][heading color=”#222″] On-time Projects [/heading]
Delivering projects on-time is critical, whether you are launching a new product, upgrading your IT, engineering a customer solution, constructing a new facility, or overhauling capital equipment. Delays and missed due dates increase costs, and undermine your competitiveness and customer service. Worse still they sap management time, and you can’t grow your business when you’re constantly fighting fires. But delivering on-time changes everything.
Viable Vision has been helping organizations deliver all-types of mission-critical projects on-time and faster, for over 20 years. We helped pharma giant Pfizer (Searle, back then) accelerate the critical last steps enabling Celebrex to become the most successful drug launch ever. Eircom, the Irish telecomm, cut the average duration of their infrastructure projects 58%, and increased on-time delivery from 75% to 98%.
If project delivery is holding you back or consuming too much of your company’s focus, we should talk. There are rigorous, proven solutions that will enable you to solve these problems and eliminate the number one constraint to moving you and your company forward.
Critical Chain
We are not fans of pushing “methodologies” on our clients, but when we come across something that promotes understanding and better performance as well as Critical Chain, we have to share it. The concepts of Critical Chain provide great insight for managers and organizations struggling to understand why projects fail in spite of their best efforts. We have seen again and again how this new understanding has enabled companies to develop effective solutions to their own challenges. The fact that organizations report fantastic results–delivering on-time, on-budget > 90%–makes it something that should be investigated by any project business. To find out a little more check out the blog post below.
[heading color=”#222″] Why Critical Chain ‘Works’ [/heading]
Critical Chain (CCPM) has a dramatic impact on the performance of projects—virtually all kinds of projects. Companies report that on-time performance shoots to above 90%, budget overruns are cut to near zero, lead times collapse 20-50%. But what I find most valuable is the insight and understanding it provides regarding project performance. By seeing clearly the cause and effect driving your performance, its a whole lot easier to create the right solutions. (read more)
[heading color=”#222″] Project Success: Terumo Heart[/heading]
Terumo Heart develops and produces products that assist blood flow in patients awaiting or unable to receive a transplant. It’s a life-changing product. They are part of Terumo Corporation, a $4 billion global medical device company. Bringing medical devices to market is a very expensive endeavor. And Terumo Heart’s second generation product was more complex and sophisticated than anything they had done before–so they knew they needed to ensure their project processes and management were robust and streamlined. Working closely with executive management Viable Vision helped the company identify and implement two significant changes–creating a PMO, and incorporating buffering and critical chain management into their planning and execution practices.
The PMO had to be built from scratch. The current, decentralized process they used to manage development was slow, inefficient and prone to poor communication that increased cost and introduced delays. The roles and responsibilities of the PMO were carefully defined and staff hired to run it. As part of the process, the company decided to standardize its planning and execution processes, incorporating Critical Chain and the Concerto software product from Realization Technologies. This would bring the more than 50 plans altogether in one system, with a common approach to planning and execution to ensure a single set of priorities and simple risk visibility. Viable Vision spent several months guiding Terumo through the transition process, training and coaching staff in the new planning and execution rules.
Within the first few months the company saw tremendous improvements in performance. The PMO immediately caused a significant reduction in re-work and improved communication led to better coordination between the development groups. The company was able to reduce one of the longest and most expensive aspects of development by 75%, shaving 18 months off the development time. While they had not previously maintained metrics on on-time performance (one of the new mandates of the PMO), the general consensus was that projects were almost never on time–and usually more than a month late. Within a few months of launching the PMO and the new planning and execution processes, on-time performance was over 70%, and more than 90% of the projects finished within one week of the due date–a remarkable improvement.