— avoiding delivery slippage, schedule templates, accelerate planning

Speaker: Oliver Gildersleeve, PMP
Meeting Date: Thursday, February 4, 2010
Time: 6:00 pm Networking; 6:30 pm Management Forum/Guided Networking; 7:00 pm dinner; 7:30 pm Presentation
Location: Ramada, Sunnyvale

Summary:
Management Forum / Guided Networking: Bring Your Management Challenge; Arrive by 6:30 PM to join this exciting Management Forum. Following informal networking is a guided discussion typically related to the topic of the evening’s after dinner talk, or of general Technology Management interest.
Light Dinner: This month we’re continuing with our light dinner format — typically sandwiches, salad, drinks, and cookie or similar light dinner.

Presentation: Get Big Gains in Productivity and On-time Delivery:
                        Winning Schedules and Management Methods
Developing new products and enhancements during the bottom of this recession enables company recovery and growth when the economy expands. Minimizing costs and maximizing revenue depends on high productivity and avoidance of delivery slippages. New products drive your company. Projects produce the new products. Schedules drive projects. Schedule templates accelerate planning productivity and enable:
   – Aligning projects with defined processes; thus, structuring projects consistently.
   – Reducing the chance of omitting tasks during planning.
   – Improving communications with management and team-members by calling the same kind
      of work in different projects by the same task name.
   – Accumulating lessons learned as they arise.
   – Gathering data to improve estimating of future projects by bottom-up scaling of tasks.

On-time delivery depends on:
   – Staggering new projects to keep workload below capacity.
   – Setting and adhering to project priorities and change-management during execution.
   – Estimating task work (not durations).
   – Reporting actual work and remaining work (not percent complete).
   – Managing throughout execution a variance buffer and a contingency for risks of delay.

This presentation demonstrates the use of a schedule template and presents methods for keeping commitments to new product delivery dates.

Bio:
Oliver Gildersleeve is vice president, project governance, with EPM Solutions, for which he teaches public and company scheduling classes across North America on Microsoft Project and Project Server. He also teaches for UC Irving at Northrop Grumman, San Francisco State University, and the Project Management Institute Silicon Valley Chapter. He is co-founder of Winning Schedules, which assists companies to quickly develop schedule templates and which trains managers and project managers in scheduling. Formerly, he was with LifeScan (Johnson and Johnson), Franklin Templeton, and the Electric Power Research Institute. Weekends he teaches sailing on San Francisco Bay. Oliver holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania: a BS in Mechanical Engineering with electives at the Wharton School, and a Masters in Systems Engineering from the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.