The usual hum of the shop has gone missing. It’s not there. Silence. I tilt my head and wonder why I don’t hear anything. Strange. Unusual. My feet propel me out the door and I see the supervisor of the fabrication shop rushing towards me. He tells me his department is at a stand still because one of my IT engineers called in sick. Who is it I asked. He throws up his hands, lets out a deep sigh, and says Roger. What project was he working on, I asked. The Fabrication Shop’s Industry 4.0 shop floor data collection project. Off he goes in a huff.
Put off, I turn around and see my Lab Supervisor coming my way. Now what, I say to myself. Same story: lab shut down, Roger, data collection project. Off in the distance, I see my Shipping department manager. I can already guess what she is going to say.
Where’s Roger?
I can’t believe it. The whole shop is shut down because Roger is not here? It’s time to visit the IT department and find out what, if anything, I can do to help. But, I don’t have time for this! I committed to myself and others I would look for answers to the criteria for a good project management solution. Now, I have to referee the “fights” between the departments effected by the project Roger is working on.
We have most department limping along, but what ties all these departments together? Sure, there is a common IT project intended to collect real-time shop data from each department. We have IT projects running all the time.
From what I can gather, Roger was working with a vendor and testing their equipment under real world conditions. Somehow, this equipment shut down each department it was connected to. It also crashed the production management system. This system releases and tracks our work orders, too. He was to only one aware of how the equipment was supposed to be configured. And, despite repeated calls, no one is able to reach Roger.
Key Resources Working On More Than One Project
When I have a chance, I catch my breath. This is a prime example of how one resource, spread across many projects, can jeopardize our whole business. After the morning I’ve had, I don’t want to go through this again anytime soon. We were able to put a patch on most of the departments effected by Roger’s equipment outage. But, that addresses the symptoms of a deeper problem.
If we ignore the limited resources working between many projects, problems will continue. It’s easy to see the delays have extended our lead times, effected our due date promises, and cost us more operate. I heard myself say, do whatever it takes to get up and running, too many times today. My team stepped up, but how much it will cost to switch back to operating the new data collection equipment. I’ll worry about that later.
Another Project Management Solution Element Identified
For now, knowing how much resource capacity we have and how it is spread across many projects must be an element in our project management solution.