How To Ensure Your Projects Finish On Time
The secret is to buffer ’till it shines.
Almost everyone can come up with an example of a job that finished late. Especially during these unprecedented and uncertain times.
You’ve most likely been on the receiving end when someone else finished late. And perhaps you too have fought as hard as you could to get a task done on time, but somehow it ended up going over the deadline anyway.
In the real world, things don’t go smoothly.
Perhaps the weather goes bad for a week, a computer crashes and loses data, contractors take longer than expected to finish another job (because of a nation-wide lockdown!), an important person gets sick, and the list just goes on. These sort of things happen in any business, in any industry, at any time.
And we know this. So, we try to allow for these unforeseen circumstances in ‘time estimates’, by adding a bit of extra time just in case something goes wrong.
But somehow, despite doing that, it’s still rare for tasks to finish on time. It
sometimes seems like it doesn’t matter how much extra time we allow, it still all gets used and we still need more.
That isn’t even the worst part! If you’ve ever heard the term ‘end-of-the-month syndrome,’ then you know how chaotic things can get. Work pressure often increases as the end of a reporting period draws near. People get overloaded and overtime increases. Other people try to help by finding something that needs to be done and doing it, or time-share between tasks so that everything gets worked on. But often, it’s a real fight to keep everything under control.
Managers react by rearranging workflows and expediting tasks to get
on-time performance back where it should be, but it often doesn’t help
enough. The deadline passes, the job gets finished — close to the
deadline if you’re lucky, some way out if you’re not — and everyone
catches their breath before the next deadline arrives. It’s not ideal.
What if you could ensure things stayed calm all through every month, there was consistent cash flow, and done-on-time-in-full rates increased significantly and permanently?
Being able to do all that, and allowing them to focus on other things, is something many managers would be willing to ‘break an arm’ for. This might sound ideal, but it’s also achievable — there’s a way to get all of that. We call the methodology that does this: ‘Buffering.’
A Buffer Is A Time Gap
The term ‘buffer’ can mean different things, but here, it simply means a ‘time gap’. A time gap requires that we act early so as to ensure smooth flow with a reliable finish in advance of the due date.
Thus, there will be a mental shift from operating in response to, “What is required today?” to operating in advance with: “Release the task today so that it is finished a buffer time ahead.” You can talk about the buffer as ‘on hand’ (in the queue) plus ‘on order’ (on the way). Best to monitor the buffer for holes in the schedule and act early to ensure the holes are filled in time.
So, how do you determine the length of a buffer (setting operational lead times)? Ask for the current lead time and how fast the product or service could be completed if expedited (or best-case scenario). Challenge whether halving the current lead time is possible (or using double the expedite time, whichever is longer). Categorise the proposed reasons as ‘normally happens,’ i.e. monthly or ‘extreme outlier,’ i.e. not monthly, but it did happen that one time… Set the buffer (time gap) to paranoid, not hysterical (to absorb variation up to the 95th percentile).
Frequent buffer-logging reveals any recurrent flow disruption patterns too. So, whenever a job is finished late, note down how late it was and why it was late. This information alone can be useful in improving performance.
Evidence of buffer-logging and interventions taken to address root cause of delayed work mean that we can predict problems in the flow and mitigate these before they impact performance.
RELATED: How To Create An Efficient Project Management Schedule
If you still have questions about the buffer methodology, or about how it relates to your situation or other aspects of what we do, let us know in the comment section below. There’s also a link to a PDF file with the full case study below. Please take a few minutes to provide us some feedback after you’ve read the PDF by filling up this form. Do leave your email if you want to also get more content from us:
