Planning in a shrinking organization
If the demand and/or turnover drops, structurally, we speak of shrinkage. In a shrinking organization you need to get a grip on the biggest expenditure, namely the employment of employees. We explain our vision on shrinking below, from the perspective of employee planning through innovative plans.
On autopsy after the end of a project (gold mining)
The start of many projects receives much attention. It is celebrated, installed, kicked-off, etc. In this article, I want to write a few tips about a stepchild in project management and that is the retrospective after the end of a project. The art & science of reflection is often an unpracticed area of management. That is a real shame because there is often so much gold to be found in terms of lessons for the future.
50% safety margins in project planning can go
According to the Critical Chain Project Management method, fifty percent of the built-in safety margins in project planning can go. It is a waste of time. So by taking this out, we can carry out projects in three-quarters of the time. That is a time saving of 25 percent. To achieve this, the method uses Buffer Management technology.
4 time wasters in project planning
The Standish Group conducts annual research into the performance of projects. It appears that there are different time wasters in project planning, so that the majority of projects are not delivered within the scheduled time. Employees incorporate a substantial safety margin during project planning to ensure that they can complete the activity on time. However, research shows that they are wasting the built-in safety margin. In this blog we look at the causes of this waste. We will try to
3 preconditions of project progress reporting
Research shows that almost half of all projects go over the end date and exceed the budget, despite the fact that project managers have progress information. Now it appears that project progress reports are often inaccurate. This creates the risk that the project manager takes the wrong decision and therefore cannot manage the project properly in time.
The art of scheduling a breakdown service
Many organizations that do project-based work offer products that should be available to customers 24 hours a day. This includes web applications, IT infrastructure and production lines. No product or service is perfect and everything can break. So there must be someone who can immediately communicate with the customer in case of a problem and who can provide a solution. To facilitate this, you must start scheduling a breakdown service and schedule employees for that breakdown service. Customers regularly ask us
Capacity planning vs. To-do planning
Companies sometimes report to us with the remark that they want to start planning. If we keep asking questions, it becomes clear what they actually mean by that. Some are looking for a tool for capacity planning to plan the working day of their employees. Others just want a tool to manage a to-do list. They want to be able to attach a deadline and project information to those to-dos. The time the employee performs the task is not certain,
From accounting for hours to being the boss of your own schedule
In some organizations, such as architecture firms, we find that employees on long-term projects are scheduled for an average number of hours per week for the duration of the project. These independent professionals are then allowed to decide for themselves each week when and how much time they spend on each project. The result is that the hours actually spent rarely correspond to the number of average hours scheduled.
Using capacity utilization rate to gain scheduling insights
The sales department really wants to land that one project and get it done fast, but is there room for it in the schedule? Despite regular demands made on management to hire more staff, convincing them can be more difficult than expected. After all, we always manage to get things done - just about - with current staffing levels, don't we? In this blog we discuss how you can use the capacity utilization rate to have evidence-based discussions with, say,
Integrating your planning software: 5 benefits
Everyone gets bogged down by repetitive tasks. That's when you can't help thinking: "Surely this can be done another way?" Tasks such as copying data, preparing paper documents and processing receipts. By integrating your planning software to, for example, your HRM or CRM or financial platform, you can easily automate these tasks. in this blog we'll look at the benefits of doing that.