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