Improve Project Performance

Does your or your organization’s success depend on its ability to deliver successful projects? Are you interested in reducing the risk of failure and taking out non-value added cost and time from project work? If you answered yes to both of these questions, then you should read on.

A powerful multi-level approach has been developed through years of research and practice in the fields of lean operations, software development, and organizational learning. It enables IT organizations to move towards lean project delivery through continuous improvement at multiple levels: projects, processes, and the overall project portfolio.

Multi-Level performance improvement focuses on helping product and software development organizations reduce cycle time in their delivery approach by enabling rapid results, learning from the experience, delivering again, and eliminating waste as projects and programs proceed through their lifecycle.

As a result of deploying this approach, project organizations can:

• Reduce time to market for new products, systems, processes and technologies
• Improve customer and end-user satisfaction with project outcomes
• Reduce risk of failure, wasted investment, and project runaway
• Improve productivity, quality and teamwork
• Continuously improve delivery from one project, phase, and iteration to the next

Unlike in the production economy of the last century, the knowledge economy requires that smart people at all levels actively engage in problem-solving to improve their practices, approaches, tools and methodologies across different timezones, disciplines and cultures.

And because new projects provide new challenges, it is more important than ever that people reflect and learn as projects, programs and strategies are "in-flight", rather than waiting until the end to do “lessons learned” that go unused or forgotten.

Action-Reflection Cycle

Action-reflection cycles are central to lean and multi-level learning. By engaging in regular retrospectives, project organizations improve as they go - as work occurs. This provides genuine motivation for people at all levels to engage in learning and continuous improvement, because see the impact that reflecting can have on improving their results.

Learn more about project retrospectives and how to lead them.

Use Lean Principles and Tools at Multi-Level Levels

Multi-Level Learning draws on the principles of lean operations to improve overall performance by engaging in regular action-reflection cycles – prospectives and retrospectives – at three different levels:

• Individual projects and programs
• Processes, systems and tools
• The overall project portfolio itself

Lean principles and tools are utilized to solve problems, reduce cycle time, improve customer satisfaction, and eliminate waste at each of these levels. PMOs can adopt this approach using best practices for the lean PMO.

Visit our library of free resources and tools.

Learn more about Dr. Julian's new book "Facilitating Project Performance Improvement: A Practical Guide to Multi-level Learning".