Critical Action Planning – How to Manage and Measure Scope and Progress

Scopes change. It’s practically a law of physics. Even if the overall project goals don’t really change, we often find that the project is harder to accomplish than we originally thought. During the project we often discover a need for new features, or our regulatory strategy changes.

Critical Action Planning makes it easy to incorporate and quantify scope changes. In fact, simple quantification of scope and progress is one of the key benefits of the Critical Action Planning approach. It’s a by-product of the technique, that requires virtually no extra work.

Here’s how.

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Critical Action Planning – Why “Division of Responsibility” Is The Wrong Approach


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Within a medical device project, “division of responsibility” among project team members is usually the default. “Division of responsibility” enables team members to feel ownership of major components of product design and simplifies accountability for project managers. What’s not to like?

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Critical Action Planning – Seven Keys To Prioritizing the Task Backlog


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New day, new data, new priorities. Like all Agile approaches, overall project execution is optimized when the highest priority tasks are performed in each “Select-Perform-Assess” cycle. So great project performance depends on great prioritization.

The project manager should expect to spend significant time every week re-prioritizing the Project Backlog, with the help of the team, incorporating project learnings and new information from the outside world into the existing project plan.

I’ve identified seven keys to Project Task prioritization, which actually can be used with any type of project management. For example, while dependencies in Gantt charts create a natural sequence of many project tasks, Gantts provide no prioritization when multiple tasks are ready to be started.

While perfection is surely the enemy of the good when it comes to task prioritization, an analytical approach can reduce errors and help the team achieve consensus on priorities. Here are the seven keys I recommend.

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Critical Action Planning – The Select-Perform-Assess Cycle and The Living Plan


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Capacity is king. You can’t do more than one week’s worth of work this week. Sounds obvious, right?

Most of the time, though, we take on too much, and end the week in frustration with lots of work still in process. When project teams take on too many tasks at the same time, everyone struggles with the ambiguity and morale is endangered.

Critical Action Planning uses the kanban technique of limiting work-in-process (WIP) to get things done.

How does the Select-Perform-Assess Cycle work in practice?

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Critical Action Planning – How To Manage Both Product And Project Risk

Any kind of Project Plan should build in tasks to mitigate both product and project risk. It’s fundamental, but we don’t always do it.

Product risks are the risks addressed by your plan already. In the concept phase, product risks relate to feasibility. For example, can we get adequate torque transfer along our thin flexible catheter in a tortuous anatomy? Can we achieve adequate signal-to-noise in our imaging system? In later phases, product risks relate to reliability. For example, will we meet the tensile spec with 0.95 reliability at 95% statistical confidence?

What do I mean by Project Risk?

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Critical Action Planning – How To Build A Baseline Plan

Critical Action Planning is my attempt to combine key elements of Critical Chain planning with an Agile/Kanban philosophical approach, specifically for companies developing physical/hardware products. Like the Critical Chain, Critical Action project management is based on a detailed best-case task list for the complete project. Like Agile/Kanban, we don’t define task dependencies or projected task start or end dates. Also like Agile/Kanban, we estimate the amount of best-case work-units required to complete each task (e.g. in person days). Eliminating dependency and date planning dramatically simplifies the planning process, and makes the project plan parseable. Like Critical Chain, we add a buffer to the best-case plan, by including tasks to represent potential re-work or project iterations. We estimate work-units for these tasks too.

That’s the Project Plan – a comprehensive list of tasks with estimated work-units for each. I keep the list in a spreadsheet, which I share with the project team. Adding, modifying or subtracting tasks is lightweight, making it easy to update the project as we go along, but we’ll discuss that more later. Today I just want to concentrate on the initial Project Plan, and introduce some terminology.

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Kanban Project Management – Beyond Agile

My colleague Jeff really opened my eyes when he introduced me to Kanban project management.

I returned the favor by telling him about the best project management book I’ve read in years: Agile Project Management with Kanban, by Eric Brechner

You can read an excerpt here.

While I loved the Agile approach in concept, in practice the learning curve was really steep. My team would have to learn sprints, scrums, and velocity management. Team members would need to learn new roles. It’s easy to find semester-long courses on how to run Agile projects. How were we going to take this on while we were busy doing our day jobs?

The Kanban approach seems more straightforward to me, and apparently to many others. In fact, Kanban project management is now starting to supplant Agile in many places.

What is kanban?

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Address Your Project Capacity Issues with These Five Questions

If your New Product Development (NPD) project management reliably delivers new products better, faster and cheaper than your competition, I’m impressed. Most of us are working hard to improve our NPD performance.

When capacity constrains a project to an undesired timeline, we must face reality:  If we simply execute the plan, we’ll be late.  Timelines matter.  What’s a project manager to do?  Here are five questions that the project team can ask, to match the capacity to the timeline. Continue reading “Address Your Project Capacity Issues with These Five Questions” →

Ten Ways Agile Project Management Differs From Traditional Gantt-based Management

The adoption of Agile project management techniques has been a key driver of improved new product development (NPD) productivity in tech and software companies (along with Moore’s law and industry adoption of technical standards). Here are ten ways Agile project management differs from traditional gantt-based management.

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Improving New Product Development Productivity – the Agile Approach

I’ve been writing recently about the wholesale abandonment of Gantt-based project management (including critical chain) by software and tech companies. In the software world, the Gantt approach has been wholly supplanted by Agile Project Management. Agile Software Development is a class of new project management techniques that has become standard practice at modern software companies, including Google,  Spotify, Amazon and practically every software startup. Agile-based new product development (NPD) leads to products that better meet customer and business needs, with shorter development timelines and with less development investment. What’s not to like?

What is Agile?

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