This week I took another step towards aligning plans and reality. ERP projects are long, with lots of moving parts, and its easy… no, its normal… for some amount of work to both escape planning (and still need to be done), or to occur either sooner or later than was outlined in the original schedule.
Using a new Office 365 site, I created a One-Note folder for work planning. Then I’ve opened a page for the upcoming week, and a second for two weeks in advance. I’m just starting with that much, knowing the team members have their heads down, and very few of them are thinking about work more than one week in advance. On the page for the upcoming week I listed a set of activities and bullet points of work that needs to be done. Example:
DATA MIGRATION
- Design General Ledger Template
- Design WIP import Template
in some cases I entered the name of the leader for the work. But I didn’t bother with estimates or resource assignments. The purpose is to give team members a quick read on what is expected. I then made sure the plans each person put on their individual status report from the previous Friday covered the work I defined.
I also pulled 2 weeks ahead from the project schedule, writing it up quickly in the same manner. My thought is to move this work to the “top”, easily done in One Note, and add another week as I get to this Friday, and once again check to see that what people are doing – and planning, matches these bullets… nothing more, nothing less.
The benefits I see so far is an easy to read, easy to update 1 week mini-target, almost like a burn-down agile list that can be viewed by any team member, any time…. since mine are spread around the globe.
I’ll post further in the coming weeks as this concept and tool matures.
