‘Front-loading’ – back in the day this was an exciting new concept for washing machines. No longer did you have to load the washing from the top, with two separate drums, one for washing, one spin drying. Space requirements were cut in half as washing and spinning now took place in the same drum, and equally importantly, front loading meant that washing machines could go under the kitchen worktop freeing up metres of usable space and adding more convenience to even the smallest of kitchens.
In the project management world however, this is all about doing work up front, that traditionally may be left until later…
…and the rewards are equally immense.
We have all heard that ‘Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance’… but do we all truly understand and abide by it?
Many successful business leaders have got to where they are because they are task oriented – the Supervisor or maybe the Dynamo of the Myers Briggs personality types model. Taking action, doing things, are what’s needed to run a business, no-one gets anywhere sitting around just thinking about it. However, whilst in a smaller business, issues and things going wrong can be spotted quickly and corrected, as a business grows, more people, more projects and just sheer size, scale and complexity, make issues more difficult to spot and makes them more likely to go further out of control before course adjustment can be made – often even impacting on the customer.
Large corporates have struggled with these challenges of scale for years, with organisations moving from functional leadership to value stream leadership (and back again). Organisation design functions put in place to manage structure to get the best mix of speed vs control etc. In fact, there are many tools that I have seen, and used myself, to address the various challenges of growth. However, frontloading is one of the most simple, effective and easy to implement.
Many larger organisations now have programme offices, in fact I have some very close former colleagues who work within these functions, and their whole ‘raison d’être’ is to plan their way through challenges, foreseeing pitfalls and breaking projects down to bitesize, manageable chunks (there is only one way to eat an elephant).
One of the keys to good a project/programme is frontloading, investing time up front, to plan the activities, foresee the pitfalls (maybe by using tools such as FMEA) and when it gets to delivery, getting it right first time… every time.
I remember early in my Ford years being amazed at the speed and volume of Engineering changes pouring through on current production vehicles. I was therefore not surprised, when years later, I learned of a benchmarking study on NPD (New Product Development) where it was found that, on average, each component on a Ford vehicle had been designed 2.7 times before the product was launched – this compared quite unfavourably to Japanese competitors who were running as low as 1.6 times – and to put this in order of magnitude, it can cost Billions if not tens of Billions of dollars to design a new car, so almost 40% pure waste, is an awful lot of cash…
On big corporate scales, the £value is easy to see. In smaller businesses, both the problem, and the impact are less easy to see, but equally significant – it’s a simple equation, would you like to reduce costs by up to 40% on every investment that you make? And yes, whilst there is an investment required in front loading (you don’t need a programme management team), the nett save is still very substantial…and, your teams and customers confidence grows as less things go wrong.
Some see front loading as slowing the process down, but I have 2 responses this:
1. Front loading doesn’t stop you from taking action. In fact, you may need to run some trials etc. to inform decisions as a part of the front loading process. If you can undertake activity, whilst managing risks and costs, I would always advocate doing it
2. When you look at all the wasted time when you don’t use front loading, does it really take any longer? Yes, it feels like it a first, everything drags on as you can’t see anything changing. But with the right business heartbeat (good use of a tiered escalation system etc.) activity should be no slower or less urgent, and in fact, my experience is that with good front loading, project activity generally takes c20-30% less time overall.
So, if you are one of those people that just loves to get ‘stuck in’ and ‘crack on with it’, next time you are about to dive into a project, just pause, and think. Is now the time to try it differently? Can the mistakes of previous projects be avoided by front loading? Should I bite the bullet, work against my instincts and give it a go…just this once?
If you do, I wish you the best of luck. It’s something you need to enter into wholeheartedly, engage the team, make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why you are doing it. And never, ever be afraid to ask for help. We all have to do everything once for the first time…and most of the time, it’s just so much, quicker, easier and less painful to learn from someone else’s mistakes, than having to learn them all over yourself…or maybe you’re still an advocate of the tub of hot water, a bar of soap and a washboard?