Over the many years of working in product development, we have encountered many obstacles with managing the appropriate number of projects with the available resources. The inability to marry the appropriate number of projects with the available resources leads to:
- Delays in projects being delivered to the marketplace
- Slow to respond to new opportunities
- Too many projects in the pipeline
- Project team members switching between/working on too many projects
We have designed the following list of management expectations for pipeline management:
1. Prioritize your most valuable projects
2. Staff the appropriate projects based on available resources
3. Don’t try to exceed available capacity
4. Projects in process are uninterrupted, unless there is a significant business issue driving a priority (e.g. Regulatory)
5. New projects do not start until resources are available
6. New projects are pulled from the top of the project queue
7. Project team members focus on 1-2 projects and minimize multitasking
8. Project team members spend 70% of their time on project work
9. The buffered end date is the project completion date. Buffers are respected.
10. Management focuses on project priorities in the queue
11. Project details are reported to management by exception Ultimately, these practices should lead to projects being delivered on-time. We have seen these practices work for our clients, and we hope they work for you.