A little more depth to the basic principles

In my previous article i introduced the basic parameters that project managers control for being successful.

We saw how an enthusiastic manufacturer produced something, a study table and chair set, that was not exactly good quality.

He could just say that I don’t care about the quality and I would not do anything different. But is there something he can do to make things better going forward.

1. He can increase the time that it takes him to produce the finished product, so that each step in the process gets its due time for the next step also resulting in the right outcome. However this means that his through put and therefore the return / revenue will slow down.

2. He could employ more people. Say, he gets more people who can perhaps cut the wooden pieces of the right size faster, so that the fixing and gluing happens faster. That in turn might give him more time for drying before the next step of say planing out the surface before the coat of polish and paint,

3. He might have done things in the wrong order. May be it would have been faster for him to smoothen each surface with a jack plane tool before he puts, nails, adhesives and screws to put the pieces of wood together. Then he can give the fixed product more time to dry before he starts putting polish and paint.

4. He can re-sequence the tasks and also plan them in such a way that he still achieves a finished product after 2 days on an average albeit he gets say more than 1 units of this study table set , available to be sold in the market. For this he uses the principle of Economy of Scale in each step. If it takes 1 unit of time for him to say cut the wood for 1 table it may only take him less than 2 units of time for the second table and surely less than N units of time for the Nth Table. In each subsequent step he may need less time on an average than what it will take to do just 1 piece of output. He would also save on material wastage because when in flow he would be able to use the small wood pieces or the last dab of paint in the bucket for the next unit of study table set that is going to be produced.

At the end of the day, one must realize that there is a minimum amount of time it takes for each task. You can’t water the paddy field twice to give you the grain in half the time. Project management is about optimization of resources of time, money and the scope of the output – quantity as well as quality. This optimization can be done in many ways and there are quite often multiple possible right answers.

Keep tuning in for more.