Project Baseline Optimization: A Quality Perspective!
Bio: Mike Hannan is Founder & Principal Consultant of Fortezza Consulting. He is a renegade thinker and leading innovator of disciplined ways to integrate Agile, Lean, Critical Chain, and other techniques to drive dramatic breakthroughs in organizational performance.
He is the lead author of the best-selling book, The CIO’s Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Performance (2014), a world-record-setting track & field athlete, and a happily married father of three adult sons.
Abstract: Serious quality management professionals know that a central purpose of managing to a specific quality threshold on any project is to ensure the strongest possible value proposition. Indeed, the scope specifications that drive a given project's value proposition call for some level of assurance that those specifications are actually met.
Just as project managers are taught the mantra "on scope / on schedule / on budget," quality management professionals are trained to make sure that the "on scope" quality thresholds are actually achieved. Indeed, such quality thresholds are often treated as sacrosanct and fixed, impervious to changes in the project's value proposition.
But what if a change in the project's triple-constraint baseline might improve its value proposition? For example, if for a given project we learn that the competition is likely to beat us to market by a month—with a very similar scope but slightly lower quality thresholds—and the value of accelerating by more than a month is expected to be worth $10M, should we adjust quality thresholds and maybe even go over budget to accelerate the project? The answer could be yes or no, but a possible re-baselining may well be called for, and at the very least we should assess whether making such tradeoffs might improve the value proposition of the project.
This session will present a way to perform such baseline optimization with far more discipline and business savvy than most project environments—and most QA departments—typically apply. If you want to elevate the stature of Quality Management in your organization by helping drive better business decisions, you won't want to miss this session.