Every observation you make in day-to-day life can draw useful analogies to your professional activities. Today while I was serviced by the girl at the cash register at the super store I noticed that she wanted to optimize the process of scanning product codes. She grouped units of the same products to scan their code only once and correct quantities in the register. Theoretically this should have taken less time than scanning code of each product unit. In fact, because of this “optimization” I had to stay at the register longer that it would without optimization. Grouping of the units the same products took her very long. So although the cashier made fewer operations the whole process took longer. The main lesson from this observation is that you should optimize the whole system (end to end sequence of steps) not separate steps or parts of process. Theory of constraints tells us that every process (or system) has a bottleneck and it is this bottleneck that should be addressed by optimization. So be sure to measure and keep an eye on performance of the whole system while optimizing.

Reading different project management related blogs I’ve come across Visiting Gantt Again. While this post by Glen Alleman gives valuable insight on underpinnings of Gantt chart, it also describes a common problem with relation between the form and the meaning, between the tool and the goal. Gantt chart is only a tool and what goals are achieved with the tool is up to project manager. After all you can run projects without Gantt charts and having a good Gantt chart does not necessarily mean that project will succeed. But it can be a valuable tool in skillful hands.

If you are interested in more information and opinions about Gantt charts check out this series of post from Reforming Project Management:

What Has the Gantt Chart Done for You Lately?
How Are You Using Gantt Charts to Brief Project Teams?
Don't Give Up on Gantt Charts Yet
Use a Gantt Chart as a Conversation Starter

For whole my conscious project management career I was and I am now a believer that manager’s great goal and destination is to help other people to be successful in what they are doing. Indeed, manager does nothing with his own hands. He has to do everything to make sure his subordinates are productive, creative and effective.

From my experience it is very important to give all team members a “sense of utility”, they need to see that what they are doing is important to someone, that someone appreciates their accomplishments. At the end of the day you want to develop pride of workmanship (how it is called in new MSF) in your people. Roots of this principle are in Edward W. Deming’s 14 Points for Management (pay attention to point #7).

If it is not possible to provide developers with connection to user and customer, or when these connections have long round-trips; as a manager you can take this on yourself. To do that I regularly, at least once a day, I walk around the office to talk with developers at their workplaces. I want to find out what they are working on, what difficulties they have, give advice and compliment for accomplishments. Not only I want to show them my care, I really want to help them do their job better. And I do that via informal one-on-one meetings that generally allow developers to feel more comfortable than on formal scheduled in advance meetings. Recently I came across interesting discussion of this technique by Jim and Michele McCarthy. I suggest you check out their podcast to learn more about One-on-One.

ReformingProjectManagement is running a poll to find out "What Has the Gantt Chart Done for You Lately?".

From my personal experience Gantt chart did not prove to be extremely useful for the amount of effort required to maintain it. But most of my projects involved a great deal of uncertainty and changes/clarifications along the course of the project. So I will not manifest Gantt chart to be bad or ineffective tool, just it was not well suited for my particular situation.

It would be interesting to see what others say on this matter.