Lean Planning

Demand That Your Strategies are Implemented

The symptoms of a poor execution plan include: consistent missed deadlines, surprise additional work, activity for the sake of activity, missed handoffs from one resource to another and apparent overall lack of communication and understanding of the current status. Lean Plan Builder creates plans which do not exhibit these symptoms of failure.

Plans are what allow us to achieve our strategic goals especially when the tasks span multiple functional compartments with in the company. A good implementation plan contains a list of tangible deliverables, a schedule, the allotted resources, a budget and most importantly the logistical map on how it will all happen. This is the generic definition of a project. Experience has proven that the state-of-the-art processes for project management can be generically applied throughout business to achieve consistent reliable achievement of critical goals.

Projects are the life blood of most companies whether they make products or provide services. Projects create the new "money pumps" and build the infrastructure to make the business run efficiently. Missing project deadlines hurts everyone in the organization. Creating implementation plans which can be effectively managed maximizes the chance of successful attainment of the goals.

Lean Plan Builder method is systematic process that creates a rigorous accurate predictive project plan. It has several very effective features:

Includes both tasks and the inter-task deliverables
Starts from the end deliverables and works backwards
Uses a proven set of five focusing questions to glean the key project features for each task
Creates the logistic network automatically as part of the process
Effectively deals with the impossibility of accurately predicting task duration in a deterministic manner
Creates tasks which are exactly the right size for the specific project

See the Newsletter: Effective Implementation Planning - Lean Plan Builder for more details.

The Lean Plan Builder process uses the enabling software tool, TMX, supplied by the Product Development Institute (PDInstitute.com). This software is an add-in to Microsoft Excel, and when used for project planning, allows the detailed project to be directly imported into Microsoft Project.