The War Room, our major battleground.

This was written on Friday, December 5.

The last two days have been spent working on preparing schedules and data for the first population of the War Room boards. The War Room is a specific conference room where all schedules, upcoming tasks, accomplishments, milestones achieved, MSPs, and Risk Charts are hung in plastic holders. Team meetings are held here, and everybody is able to visually see, at a glance, how the project is progressing, and what is upcoming, or what is holding the project back. My primary tasks with Company X are to continually send out periodic e-mails requesting updates on task completions, risks, issues to progress, and schedules slides. This is where that vital communication comes in; I update phase reviews, master schedules, and other databases that are used when tracking and controlling the project and presenting progress to management. Rick printed all of the forms last night that I sent to him, and we will polish up the War Room today. It is important that we have this War Room up by Friday (our deadline) because the corporate office will be coming in to see Company X’s plans on Tuesday of this upcoming week.





Each function gets its own 6 holders with frequently updates schedules and data forms.



The Project Management function will have 18 holders.



The company Quality Manager did a stellar job of hanging all the holders on the wall. Since Company X is leaving the building to a demolition crew (condos will be built on this site), then the holders were drilled directly into the wall; in other companies, we have them hung on pieces of plywood.



Rick, my boss, surveys the work that is posted so far, while two men from the production management team review the diagrams for the new building (see below).



When a company is moving, it is important to use this transitional time to implement lean quality processes. The equipment must be carefully arranged for value creation and waste minimization.

Still preparing materials

I spent about 7 hours today running to Staples, Kinkos, a local printer, and meeting with Rick in Redmond. We worked on the presentation, I worked on assembling the training books, and so far, things are almost wrapped up.
Now I just need to go to Kinkos tonight to pick up some business cards for Hammons, who is going to come in and supervise the facilitation for a few days, while Rick is otherwise booked up.
Tracey and I had to fake up the business card for Hammons today because the native file is in an old version of Corel, and she does not have the hi-res logo, or the fonts. She opened my PDF business card through Illustrator and worked her magic, finding a similar font and overlaying it on my business card. The final version looks so similar to the original cards that you can't even tell at first glance that there is any difference at all!