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Monthly Meeting 01/07/2010

Thu, 01/07/2010 - 6:30am

Web Training

For those interested in using / contributing to the website (especially new board members and volunteers), we will have a Q&A session starting at 5:30PM on January 7 (right before the monthly meeting) at Ramada. Come few minutes earlier if you bring your laptop in order to connect to Ramada Wi-Fi.

Time
  • 6:00 PM: Registration
  • 6:30 PM: Management Forum
  • 7:15 PM: Dinner
  • 7:45 PM: After Dinner Presentation
  • 9:00 PM: Adjourn
Management Forum
Topic: 
Networking
Presented by: 
Facilitated by IEEE-SCV-TMC board member

We will talk about our experience with project productivity improvements.

After Dinner Presentation
Topic: 
Value-based Scheduling: Get your Organization's Priorities Straight
Presented by: 
Rino Jose, Phd

A key management challenge today is juggling multiple projects in the face of shifting priorities and overcommitted teams. Studies show that multi-tasking and context switching lead to suboptimal performance and execution, but is single tasking enough? In order for single tasking to be effective, people must know which tasks bring the most value to the organization, a deceptively simple problem. Common strategies, such as assigning revenue to tasks or prioritizing by ROI, are difficult to use in practice and ignore a crucial factor: the value of time. 

 

"Value-based scheduling" is a new approach that integrates product value information with engineering and project information to assign a "cost of delay" to every task in an organization. Using this technique, individuals' tasks can be automatically prioritized by value so that everyone knows which tasks have the biggest impact on the organization. This technique can also be extended to scheduling an entire project portfolio by value, integrating marketing and engineering updates automatically. The resulting schedules are load-leveled and have realistic completion dates that maximize the value of the project portfolio.

 

This presentation introduces the concept of value-based scheduling and demonstrates its use in engineering development projects.

 

See the slides here.

Rino Jose is the principal co-founder of Lakeway Technologies (http://www.lakeway-tech.com), a company that develops web-based enterprise software for Engineering groups. He has developed software and managed software teams professionally for over 15 years. As a management consultant, he has led turnarounds for multiple engineering teams and is skilled at defining and establishing processes to yield consistent and predictable execution. Rino holds a B.S. from U.C. Berkeley and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania with cross-disciplinary focus between Engineering, Computer Science, and the Wharton Business School.

Meal
Choices: 
Chicken or Turkey Sandwich
Vegetarian or Tuna Sandwich
Pastrami or Beef Sandwich
Meal includes: 
Salads, Chips, Sodas or Coffee
Place

RAMADA Silicon Valey

Location

RAMADA Silicon Valley
1217 Wildwood Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
United States
Phone: 408-245-5330
See map: Google Maps

Read more...

Cost
  • All charges are paid at the door by check or cash
  • No credit cards
Early bird – IEEE member: 
$10.00
Early bird – Non-member: 
$13.00
Early bird deadline: 
12:30PM 01/05/2010 (PST)
Standard – IEEE member: 
$13.00
Standard – Non-member: 
$16.00

Comments

Using value-based scheduling for research groups

Sat, 01/09/2010 - 10:40am — rjose

One of the issues that several people raised was the applicability of value-based scheduling to research groups. Ilya and I chatted about this briefly after the presentation, and we had a quick e-mail exchange as well. Here are the points that he raised:

I really liked your presentation, as well as I found the value-based
idea for project management as fresh and very promising. I do have a
concern of effectiveness of this idea in startup environment with a
significant degree of innovation and R&D present. The projects tend to
be less defined, there are more open-ended tasks, and potential market
analysis is very murky. I am curious to hear your thoughts of how your
system may address these special cases.

For these cases, there are a couple of techniques that should be used in addition to value-based scheduling:

 

  • Workflows: Any research activity will have false starts and dead ends. The key to being effective is having appropriate decision points for checking progress and deciding whether to iterate, try something new, or stop. Using these workflows, we can automaticallly adjust or even redefine the project structure when we reach these decision points. Value-based scheduling can work with this automatically (that's is how it's implemented in Lakeway Frontier).
    Any research activity will have false starts and dead ends. The key to being effective is having appropriate decision points for checking progress and deciding whether to iterate, try something new, or stop. Using these workflows, we can automaticallly adjust or even redefine the project structure as we reach these decision points. Value-based scheduling plugs can work with this automatically (this is how it's implemented in Lakeway Frontier).
  • Buffers: Someone in the audience asked how the "critical chain method" could work with value-based scheduling. I think this is a case is a good illustration. In the critical chain method we recognize that resource bottlenecks are what often drive schedules, but because they change so quickly, it's hard to know where they are. The "workaround" for this is to estimate tasks at 50% confidence and 90% confidence and then sum the difference between these estimates (for all tasks) to come up with buffers for the project (effort, budget, duration). We set the target date for the project to be the 90% estimates, but we manage to the 50% numbers. Value-based scheduling comes in by computing marginal value at both the 50% and 90% dates and combining them to yield an "expected marginal value".
  • Expected product value: Research is tricky because often the outcome is binary: it's worth $1B or nothing. However, we start these projects because we have some understanding of the risk. We also start these projects because we have some understanding of the market. If we have enough information to approve these projects, we have enough information to come up with value curves. They may change more radically as the projects go on, but that accurately reflects the situation and the information we learn as we go forward.

 

 

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