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.

Facilitating a meeting - looking for cooperation!

We are back in the conference room at Company XYZ with the whole project team for the day, again working on the WBS process. Unfortunately, a few hidden agendas are already rising to the surface.

A facility manager seems to be far too optimistic, assuming he can take on the role of GC (General Contractor) and wear a number of other hats without any problem. I am not sure why he is assuming he can take on all this work and not drop the ball anywhere, as past Lessons Learned have proven often happens when such an attempt is made. I've learned from another manager here he can be a real "stick in the mud", sometimes far too cocky about his knowledge and abilities. In a recent project where some team members tried to reorganize floor layout, the facility manager got so belligerent about it that he refused to help at all; machines that were marked for move had to be physically moved by the production manager, since help from facilities was not made available. He is unwilling to implement changes and prefers to stay in the past mode of work; he seems to think that he "knows everything", and we all know how impossible it is to work with team members who know everything and listen to no one.

The production manager who attempted to implement the changes in the past is a forward thinking man with an agenda of lean, modern processes, and smooth flow. He is working hard for the betterment of the company, and hopefully, in the end, he will take the hill and win the battle.