Standardisation

What if we stopped creating new project plans?

Story time – years ago, when I still had hair, I walked into a project management office inside a new Intel fabrication plant that was being built. Huge Gantt charts covering the walls, thousands of people involved, over a Billion Dollar cost. But the interesting bit – I learnt that they copy the plans, to the letter, from the last fab that was built, only changing where things failed. It’s a methodology that they called Copy Exactly, and it was designed to guarantee high volume production faster, and quick problem resolution. Bottom line – if it was successful, let’s stick to it.

Now, software delivery is not like building a fab, but here are some of my takeaways – When projects become standard and repeatable, we are rewarded with predictability and higher quality results. With standardisation knowledge becomes more evenly spread across teams. Standardisation is easier in a product-led organisation, the delivery teams do not need to rethink plans in order to cater for “but I also want this thing that my Excel does today…”. And finally, bespoke projects cost structures require a different methodology, usually dictating T&M pricing, or a detailed analysis first and only then budgeting and execution.

Back to my first question – no, we cannot always avoid new plans, but we can and should create templates and reuse what worked in the past.