The goal of project planning is to create a workable schedule and plan that provides all stakeholders with the information they need – from activities and tasks to deadlines and milestones. However, the path to creating a workable schedule is riddled with complexities, especially if the schedule is developed within a silo.
Collaborative planning is one way to bridge the issues of silo scheduling and lack of information, but implementing collaboration in the planning process also presents its own set of challenges.
For collaboration to work well, project leadership must blend soft skills, technology and project governance to cultivate an environment of open communication and flow of information. True collaboration requires transparency, communication, symmetrical knowledge, and most importantly, that egos be set aside.
Tips for Promoting Collaboration
- Check your egos at the door. Ego battles can create major roadblocks in the planning process.
- Be transparent. Lay everything out on the planning table. Suppressing ideas or concerns will only cause problems later.
- Communicate. Create open avenues of communication for all stakeholders, from investors and architects to ribbon-cutters and work-site crews.
- Share information. Make sure everyone has access to the same information in order to create symmetrical knowledge about the project and plan.
- Take a step back. Review your planning process and project as if you were an outsider to see if there are any structural inhibitors to collaboration.
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Creating a social structure that promotes collaboration at the project’s inception is an easy way to get everyone started on the same foot. Once everyone understands that there is a requirement to cooperate, maintaining a collaborative environment should be less of a struggle.
Scheduling face-to-face planning meetings with the entire team is an optimal way to develop a schedule. With real-time meetings, all stakeholders can discuss and visualize the time-scaled plan and see how each sequence may affect them. One way to start is to hold a full-wall planning session; this method makes things easy to visualize, but it doesn’t allow for the possible impacts of change in the logic tree.
Using the Graphical Path Method (GPM) allows project teams to overcome these issues and integrate immediate feedback into the evolving schedule and diagram. Incorporating real-time updates and feedback infinitely improves the schedule and planning process, and reduces the time spent manually reworking the schedule.
Another easy way to stay on task during the planning process is to implement the OODA Loop, originally developed by Colonel John Boyd of the United States Air Force. The loop helps to refine the process of responding to evolving situations by reminding team members to Observe, Orient, Decide and Act.
While there are varying methods for planning, a GPM practitioner’s central belief that “seeing is planning” perfectly explains the visual components of GPM and its software, NetPort. For many project teams, it is difficult to understand the various interconnections of a schedule without a visual aide. And it’s particularly difficult to understand an evolving plan that has so many moving parts.
Utilizing visual components within a collaborative planning environment from the project’s inception can help create better a plan – one with less roadblocks and obstacles. And now, project leaders can easily create such an environment for their team by using available technologies. GPM offers all stakeholders the ability to engage in the development of mathematically accurate, visual, time-scaled network diagrams, creating equal footing and transparency throughout the planning process.