— single-tasking, load leveling, cost of delay

Speaker: Rino Jose, PhD
Meeting Date: Thursday, January 7, 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: Value-based Scheduling: Get your Organization’s Priorities Straight
A key management challenge today is juggling multiple projects in the face of shifting priorities and overcommitted teams. Studies show that multi-tasking and context switching lead to suboptimal performance and execution, but is single tasking enough? In order for single tasking to be effective, people must know which tasks bring the most value to the organization, a deceptively simple problem. Common strategies, such as assigning revenue to tasks or prioritizing by ROI, are difficult to use in practice and ignore a crucial factor: the value of time.

“Value-based scheduling” is a new approach that integrates product value information with engineering and project information to assign a “cost of delay” to every task in an organization. Using this technique, individuals’ tasks can be automatically prioritized by value so that everyone knows which tasks have the biggest impact on the organization. This technique can also be extended to scheduling an entire project portfolio by value, integrating marketing and engineering updates automatically. The resulting schedules are load-leveled and have realistic completion dates that maximize the value of the project portfolio.

This presentation introduces the concept of value-based scheduling and demonstrates its use in engineering development projects.

See the slides here http://www.slideshare.net/rjose/valuebased-scheduling/

Bio:
Rino Jose is the principal co-founder of Lakeway Technologies (http://www.lakeway-tech.com), a company that develops web-based enterprise software for Engineering groups. He has developed software and managed software teams professionally for over 15 years. As a management consultant, he has led turnarounds for multiple engineering teams and is skilled at defining and establishing processes to yield consistent and predictable execution. Rino holds a B.S. from U.C. Berkeley and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania with cross-disciplinary focus between Engineering, Computer Science, and the Wharton Business School.