Maddie had joined the Navy straight out of school. There weren’t a lot of career options for a small-town girl who wanted to see the world, and the Navy at least paid for her transport and accommodation. The Navy had also been where she got started as an engineer. It turned out that being an engineer for a civilian company paid a lot better, and although you didn’t get to visit remote Pacific islands as often, at least you didn’t have to worry about sinking quite so often either.
Sometimes, though, Maddie thought that the most valuable thing the Navy had taught her was how to swear. Maddie had an impressive vocabulary of swear words in a variety of languages, and she could swear for several minutes at a time without repeating an obscenity. She was using that talent now.
Shanaka waited until Maddie had finished, then politely clapped his hands.
“Impressive, really impressive, Maddie,” he said. “I should record that sometime, so the customers know what you think of them.”
Maddie glared at him. “Don’t you dare,” she growled. “In fact, if you can find some way of shoving all our customers into the sun, that would be good.”
“More problems with the Mac-Air contract?” Shanaka asked.
Shanaka and Maddie both worked for CAC, the Cool Air Corporation, which provided industrial refrigeration and air-conditioning systems nationwide. As senior engineers, they were collectively responsible for several installation teams which were assigned to a variety of jobs. Unfortunately, they were also responsible for the successful completion of the contracts CAC won, which hadn’t been going as smoothly as either of them would have hoped. Maddie had just come back from a meeting with the head of the sales team.
Maddie shook her head. “No, the Mac-Air contract is finished, thankfully. They grumbled the whole time, but they eventually agreed it was complete and signed off on it.”
“To be fair, in the post-project review meeting Mac-Air tabled a number of improvements they wished we had included, complaining they never had the opportunity to share them until it was too late,” Shanaka said.
“What Mac-Air were complaining about is that they were getting a whole lot of handovers that they couldn’t do anything with. Each one needed a meeting or inspection, which chewed up time, and they still couldn’t use what we gave them until the end. I’m not surprised they got grumpy.”
“Yeah…” Maddie sighed. “I can kind of see it too, but we didn’t have much choice. We accommodated their feedback from last time, and gave them as much opportunity as we could to share their feedback. We just can’t win! Anyway, since you’re here, perhaps you can help me with something related to that issue.”
Shanaka nodded. “Sure. What’s up?”
“Well, with the Mac-Air contract finished, all our install teams are free for the next big project. And trust me, it’s a big project. No names, of course, but a company named after a big river is building a data centre nearby, and somehow we got the contract for all the cooling and HVAC work.”
Shanaka pursed his lips in a silent whistle, and his eyes went wide.
“That is a big job…” he said slowly. “I hate to ask the question, but do we actually have the capacity to handle it?”
Maddie grimaced. “Yes. Probably. If we take on some sub-contractors, and use our teams to direct them… I think we can do it. But we’ll have to plan out the work allocations really well, and there’s a challenge here. On the one hand, we need to make sure the handovers are all high value – we can’t get away with the same thing we did with Mac-Air, where we had it all bundled into one big ‘reveal’ at the end. Nor can we completely unbundle the handovers either. Neither will work out well here. Though, we do need to know as soon as possible if something’s gone off-target.”
“This project is far too big for us to re-engineer if it turns out something needs to be changed. We’re going to have multiple teams working at once, on different things, and a whole bunch of sub-contractors doing stuff as well. How do we keep visibility of the state of the project?”
“Ugh.” Shanaka thought for a moment. “Tough one. The timing of handovers is probably key to it, isn’t it? I mean, we just don’t have enough pairs of eyes to check everything ourselves. When one of our install teams gets a handover from a sub-contractor, they have to be able to check whether what the sub-contractor gave them is fit for purpose. And when one of our install teams marks something off as completed, that’s the point where we have to be sure that it’s what the client actually wanted and will deliver what was promised. We don’t want to be changing things once the data centre is mostly built.”
“So… three things we need to do, then,” Maddie said thoughtfully. “First is to make sure each project milestone delivers value for the client or is a useful handover. The second is to break down each milestone into a series of small bursts of effort. Let’s try half the chunk size we currently use, I don’t want any month-long tasks in there. We have to be able to show measurable progress and follow through on any change requests with minimal disruption. Let’s not have those mountains of change requests happen again. And third is to deliver each of those project milestones as soon as possible, so the customer can benefit from them, even if the rest of the job isn’t complete.”
Shanaka shrugged. “Sounds good to me,” he said. “But it also sounds like a huge amount of work to get that all organised. How much time do we have?”
“There’s almost three months before they break ground on the data centre,” Maddie replied. “That’s more than enough time for us to get all of these milestones and handovers broken down into chunks.”
Shanaka grimaced. “I hope you’re right,” he said.
Close to the end of the year, it was Shanaka’s turn to swear. He didn’t have Maddie’s vast experience, but he was making up for it with enthusiasm and commitment. When he had finished, Maddie nodded in satisfaction.
“Not bad,” she said, “You’re really getting the hang of this. Now, do you care to tell me what’s caused this little outburst?”
Shanaka groaned and buried his face in his hands. “It’s that idea we talked about for the data centre, about breaking tasks down into chunks. It’s all gone wrong.”
“Can you be more specific?”
Shanaka looked up gloomily. “It started badly,” he said, “With nobody knowing what was supposed to be in a chunk. How do we declare the end of one chunk and the start of another? Our people see it as one continuous activity: “You get started and you keep working on it until it is all done” After a couple of attempts, though, we got around that, by getting whoever was meant to receive the handover to specify what they needed to receive to be able to complete their bit of the project. And that was fine – it took a few more goes to get the handover specifications working well, but we did, and that actually sped things up, and with the size of the chunks there has been little resistance to changes when they were required, so that was all good.”
Maddie nodded. “Yep, that all sounds great, actually,” she said. “It certainly helped with progress visibility too, which is what I was hoping for. So why so gloomy? Has it all started going wrong?”
“I don’t know! Breaking things into smaller chunks sped things up, right? So we broke them up even smaller and smaller, so we could go even faster and faster, but somehow the opposite has happened. ”
“Huh.” Maddie grinned. “Rookie mistake, Shanaka. Each chunk still has to be checked, and those checks take time. I’ll bet your people are complaining about the number of reviews and the wait time that adds while the next person gets around to it. It must feel like you’re doing nothing but checking handovers, right?”
“Actually, yeah.” Shanaka raised his head. “Do you mean that we just… went too far?”
“Sounds like it,” Maddie agreed. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, Shanaka. That’s something we used to say in the Navy – good enough really is good enough, while perfect is a pain in the ass and often not worth the trouble anyway. Start by halving the chunk size, and if that works OK, halve it again, in my opinion. By that stage, you’ve probably got the best out of the speed and visibility improvements anyway, and your focus needs to move to something else as the limiting factor.”
Shanaka sat back in his chair, feeling more optimistic than he had for some time. “So… you think we’re ready for more big projects like this one?”
“Yeah!” Maddie grinned. “Let’s show them how a project should be delivered.”