A tool for planning and control of scrap materials

According to my observations, at the average IT conference, the number of reports about Ajaila and Scrum has been slightly off-scale lately. At such a time to play agile-bullshit-bingo .

But no matter how good the processes are, there is always the possibility to twist something up and do a little bit better. Today I will talk about how we struggled with the "forgetfulness" of project managers in our studio.

What was first

Planners with project managers (I will call them managers, for short) were held once a week. Every Monday we gathered at the big kanban board and looked at the cards. On each card was the name of the project, its lead manager and a list of project tasks scheduled for the past week. Tasks included project management and all the bureaucracy associated with it: contracts, acts, payments, negotiations, briefing, etc.
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Then we analyzed what was done, where difficulties arose and how to do better next time. Fixed, and then made a plan for the current week.

All the "promises" were duplicated to the manager in Skype, after which he sat down at the weekly list of tasks and planned his project activities.

But everything is not so simple

As it turned out, this approach causes problems. It got to the point that about 40% of all planned tasks were not executed (or were not fully completed, which is equivalently “not executed”).

We analyzed it.

After debriefing, we found out that we have two main reasons for non-compliance.

The first is called "forgotten." Since the large project board was used only once a week, there appeared a chance that some “minor” routine task was simply lost.

The second reason - "there were more important things." Daily routine no one thought assigned priorities. Therefore, the manager, usually, himself decided what needs to be done faster, and what he can wait until next year until Friday. Sometimes the speed of such a task was influenced by the simplicity of its performance. Sometimes the determining factor was the time for implementation. Sometimes - a customer call.

And we started trying to change something.

First of all, we moved the whole routine to Google Calendar.

It became almost good, but ...

Got the effect of "planning horizon waves." I mean that the manager could not give an accurate forecast in advance of his entire routine work (and could not even distribute the load). Therefore, a “wave” was obtained: a huge number of tasks were planned for Monday, a smaller number of tasks were scheduled for Tuesday, and a void in the calendar for other days.

Everything happened like this: on Monday, not all tasks were performed (which is natural), some of them “flowed” on Tuesday, then on Wednesday, and so on. But the tasks performed in fact, after such a wave - remained very, very small.

The calendar helped to overcome the "forgetfulness", but that's not all. It remains to pack the tasks on the importance, plus to this - the managers began to morally run out of steam. Lost the belief that the "wave" in general can be defeated in a week.

And we changed something again

Actually, the reason for demotivation is the constant “under-commitment” to one’s own plan. And merciless pressure from the leadership, accompanied by shouts of "why not done ?!" and "until ?!".

Therefore, we decided to do this: set a scheduled time for each task and physically limit their number per day. Experimentally we found out that the optimal total time per day is six hours. The remaining two hours are unforeseen cases and “insurance” against an inaccurate assessment.

The calendar also allowed not only to do tasks of varying degrees of duration, but also to assign each time to "start".



For such a mini-planning was given for five minutes per person. The manager and the head of the studio together looked at the plan for the day, carried out an express assessment of the time and chose the order of execution. Here we discussed the last day and, depending on the situation, distributed the remaining outstanding tasks.

Doctor, you did it!

In this simple way, we almost completely got rid of the "wave". Performance has risen to 80-100%. Demotivation has declined. However, some of the tasks were still not performed: the task itself was forgotten, or the managers “forgot the priority”.

And we made a simple visualization.

We decided to do the obvious (but this solution proved to be extremely effective).

We began to print daily plans. They gave each manager a bright highlighter. As soon as the task was completed, it had to be crossed out with a marker.

Got three fat plus

Firstly, it became enough to go through the office (30 seconds) to see the progress level of each. The caustic colors of highlighters can be seen from afar.

Secondly, the managers themselves had a completely tangible tool for self-motivation. Filled plan - joy, gaps in the plan - the coming punishment. Simple and easy to understand. When the manager was loaded into 4-6 projects and 7-15 tasks planned for 6 working hours, almost 100% of all tasks of the day and week were achieved.

Thirdly, we received a metric, albeit a rough one. Plan sheets are now collected every morning and neatly folded into containers with names.

We calculated the costs

In the workflow for every 5-7 projects (or 1 manager), the following costs were required:

• Time: 5-10 minutes of the manager for independent planning of the day.
• 5-10 minutes of the manager and the manager for the analysis of yesterday and the development of the plan for the next day.
• Total: 60 to 120 minutes a week working time.
• 5 sheets of paper per day.
• Toner in the printer, highlighter.

And - as a conclusion

There is no guarantee that this process will not be revised in a month or two, but for now I like what is happening. Plan-> Do-> Check-> Act without a break :)