I spoke last Monday (9/28/09) at North Carolina PMI’s Annual Event on Commitment-Based Project Management (CBPM for short) and the impact it can have to accelerate projects. With close to 100 people in the room, there was lots of interest on this approach.
As many of you may know, CBPM is based on work done at Intel to develop its semiconductor chips. Faced with a vicious cycle of commit-fail to meet-decommit in its projects, a different approach was taken by the chip set business (chip sets are the supporting chips for the microprocessor — without them, new microprocessors cannot go to market. Hence their criticality). Timm Esque in his Excellent No Surprises Project Management, describes the situation and how it was overcome. For those of you in LinkedIn, there’s a group called “Project Acceleration thru Commitment-Based Project Management” that you may want to join. Also, in my profile, I have posted a presentation and a file describing the approach. Go to http://www.linkedin.com/in/josesolera to access.
Out of this 100 or so people who attended, 18 have requested my Excel spreadsheet used to manage the approach (if you want a copy, send me a note at jose.solera@pmlead.com). The spreadsheet makes it easy to track deliverables by highlighting who owns each deliverable, when are they committed to delivering it, who uses it, and what’s the status. A few other capabilities, such as SPI and CPI as well as a Performance Against Commitment (PAC) chart are available with it.
It was refreshing to see the amount of interest on this approach, an alternative to the more traditional project tools. Maybe you want to give it a go?
Have a great day!