Our Methodology

Through many years of experience implementing scheduling solutions we’ve developed a methodology that we believe delivers lasting benefits.

More than just providing new technology, we will assist you with the behavioural changes needed to ensure the project is successful.

New technology, new behaviours, new measures are the key to a successful implementation. Without all of these elements the benefits of the project won’t be fully realised.

People establish behaviours and processes to work around limitations.

If your current solution has limitations and inefficiencies, people interacting with it will develop work arounds and behaviours that are necessary to deal with these limitations.

Changing the technology to remove the technical limitations won’t remove the limitations in the system as a whole, especially ones that have been established and ingrained for years.

Only when behaviours have changed in order to work with the new technology will you change the system as a whole and unlock the desired benefits.

These are the simple steps we follow with each new project:

Start with the end in mind

  • Define business rules that the schedule should adhere to

  • Define appropriate measures of schedule quality (KPI’s)

  • Get historical schedules/actuals and pass them through our Schedule Analyzer

  • Review the analyzer output to check current alignment to the stated rules and objectives

  • Identify inconsistencies between stated objectives and current behaviours

  • Challenge the objectives and ensure they are truly appropriate and achievable

Identify the limitations in the system that are causing current behaviours and then define the approach to resolving them

  • From the process above you should be able to identify undesired behaviours and the limitations causing them

  • Don’t fall into the trap of trying to solve the symptoms

  • Define appropriate measures that will encourage the required behavioural changes
    Note: Measurements encourage behaviour (good and bad), make sure you’re measuring the right things and in the right way

  • Make sure the changes will benefit the business as a whole

  • Identify functionality in the technical solution that will be required to remove the current technical limitations and also support the new measurements

It’s only once all this is done that we start to build the technical solution, a solution that is specifically tailored to our client’s real needs and requirements.

We have also found that a successful project will depend on our clients commitment to:

  • Provide the appropriate and sustained resources to the project

  • Keep things simple

  • Have well defined and measurable objectives

  • Agree on the projects outcome and implementation from the start

  • Foster change

  • Empower the project team to initiate change

  • Provide access to real data as soon as possible