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How to Shorten Time to MarketIntroductionShortening time to market is not a marketing problem. Neither is it engineering or a product development problem. Shortening time to market is a project management problem. Essentially, the issue is to shorten the Critical Path of the project. BasicsYou remember the Critical Path don’t you? From college perhaps? Or that project management course you once went on? It’s that thing that everybody knows, but nobody can quite explain. Just to remind you, the Critical Path is that sequencing of jobs which governs the completion date of the project. Projects will have different durations depending on how the jobs are sequenced. The aim of Critical Path Analysis is to find the sequence of jobs, which results in the shortest possible duration. Before we examine shortening the Critical Path, it is worth taking a look at how jobs get sequenced in the first place. In general, it appears to me that there are three different ways that this occurs. The first way is that it just happens itself. Charlie, the Java programmer, works on something for a few days, and then leans over the partition and tells Bozo that he needs the such-and-such and Bozo says he’ll have that in a day or two and Charlie does something else in the meantime and so it goes on. It sounds stupid when it’s written like this, but if nobody is actively project managing the project, then this is pretty much what happens. The second way is that the jobs get sequenced in real time. In this approach, Bozo the Project Manager comes in in the morning, says ‘Crikey, where do I start?’ He begins organizing one piece of the project, but then he has to go to a meeting about some other aspect of it. While he’s at the meeting, he gets called out for an urgent phone call about yet another part of it. But now he has to rush off to a status meeting with his troops and so on and so on. Does this sound familiar at all? In this approach, everything becomes – to use that much maligned ‘f’ word - a ‘firefight’. There is a third approach that can be adopted. This is to plan the project in intricate detail and sequence as many of the jobs at the beginning of the project. Where we have knowledge about the project, we use that knowledge to help us determine the sequence of jobs. Where we don’t have knowledge – and at the beginning of any project, there are lots of things we are uncertain about – we can use assumptions to enable us to sequence jobs. This is not a particularly earth-shattering idea. In the pre-production phase of making a movie, this is precisely what is done, and while some movies still go ballistically over budget and schedule, it is now much more common that they run with a precision that would delight any accountant. It is my contention that you will get the most efficient sequencing of jobs by doing this upfront planning. (If you want proof of this statement, I suggest your best bet is to try it and see what an improvement it is over either of the other two approaches.) By ‘most efficient sequencing of jobs’, I mean the sequencing that shortens the Critical Path of your project – and hence the time to market of your product. Building on the basicsYou can think of what we’ve just been describing as trying to ensure that your time to market doesn’t get any longer. You’re trying to ensure that as little of the available time as possible is wasted on the project. However, there’s a better thing you can do. This is to go out and proactively look for ways to shorten the project. This requires that you gather some basic data from completed projects about where the time and effort went on those projects. Basically what you need is the actual order in which the jobs were done, and for each job what the actual elapsed time and effort for that job were. (While the more sets of data you have the better, once you have one set, the following technique will work.) Let’s say, for example, you establish that on the one completed project for which you have data, you spent 36% of the elapsed time on the Design phase. You can now look inside that phase and understand why it took as long as it did. You can see whether
If you do this it won’t be hard to find those improvements. |
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