Mike Dalton

Consider whether your boss's resistance is really the issue. 1) Make sure the ideas you bring forward align with your company's strategy. 2) Make sure the ideas you bring forward are based on real customers' needs by getting out of the office and talking directly with them to discover their limitations and problems - their unmet needs. Use that knowledge to sell your company leadership on developing solutions.

Everyone likes to complain about communication but no one wants to communicate - OK that's an exaggeration - but only a bit of one If you're leading an important project team a quick daily huddle for team members can make all the difference for staying on track. But OMG, no one has 10-15 minutes for another meeting. So reward them by guaranteeing fewer project update meetings. Because if the daily huddle is done right, you won't need all those update meetings to get things back on track.

It's also important to recognize a team when they pull the plug on a bad project/bad idea. It might feel like you are sending the message that it's OK to lose, but you're really sending the message that it's OK to tell the emperor that he has no clothes. That we don't punish truth-tellers if they did their best. Of course, that advice needs to be backed up by actions (no punishment) and by good discipline around doing after action reviews (AARs) so your organization learns from the mistake.

Don't get yourself into this kind of pickle in the first place by structuring the first half of any development project as a learning phase. That's where you answer what we call the Big 5 critical questions about commercial, technical, manufacturing, regulatory and IP (freedom to operate). Until you've made the critical decisions around each of these any prediction of when you can deliver is a bit of a SWAG. So launch commitments should only be made when these decisons around the Big 5 have been made. The other thing to avoid here is doing technology development as part of a product development timeline. Follow these approaches and you should be able to hit product launch commitments with pretty decent accuracy (like 90+%).

Organizations and those who lead them need to know that projects will be delivered on time. Scope can be reduced in software to meet a required timeframe, but that is rarely true in physical products. Too often the argument for agile is its iterative rather than waterfall nature but few organizations use waterfall in the early stages of a development project where the scope/solution space is being mapped. That said many elements of the agile manifesto (mostly borrowed from lean BTW) can be used for projects of all types (Limit WIP, one piece flow or small batch work) while not ignoring time.

Don't start the project until you have clarity on 2 simple things: 1. What success looks like 2. How that success helps your organization meet its goals