1. Stuck! Professor Rebecca Henderson & Professor Nelson Repenning
MIT Sloan School of Management &

2. Or

3. Why it can seem to be so hard to get anything done & What can be done about it

4. Or

5. Why you’re sometimes tempted to think the people who work for you are lazy & Why they don’t think so much of you, either

6. Outline Why we get stuck: Why we stay stuck: What can be done:
An introduction to the dynamics of overload & the dangers of firefighting
Why we stay stuck:
The obvious solutions often make things worse
What can be done:
Knowing one’s capacity
Killing project #26
Facing worse before better

7. Is This Your Project Pipeline?

8. Are these your delivery dates?
Scheduled
delivery
date
Actual delivery date

9. Does this look familiar?
79% apparently complete by original deadline
2 major unplanned iterations requiring redesign
Actual duration: 208% of schedule

10. Cumulative Labor Hours: 403% of plan
Construction Project
Project A
Cumulative Labor Hours: 403% of plan

11. What’s going on?

12. Overload at PreQuip Rate of Utilization (percent) –– 289.9 307.9 226.954
123 86
286 24
352 75
215
153 29
Resources
Required for
Completion
(months)
Active Projects 1 2 3 4 5 . 26 27 28 29 30
(formal development
projects by number)
Implied Development Resource
Allocation (months)
This year
Next year
Year after that 40 38 50 92 24 48 62 60 29 14 36
172
150 13 80 93 23 22
120 95 8 24 12 20 4 36 9 30 18 3
Months to
Completion
(desired)
(customer support, troubleshooting)
All Other Support Activity ––
430
Total Development Requirements ––
2783
2956
2178
Available Resources (months) ––
960
Rate of Utilization (percent) ––
289.9
307.9
226.9

13. Overcommitment destroys productivity
Average
Value-Added
Time on
Engineering
Tasks
100%
80%
60%
40%
20% 0% 1 2 3 4 5 6
Number of Projects per Engineer

14. And shifts attention away from early stage work
Phases
Knowledge
Concept
Basic
Prototype
Pilot
Manufacturing
Acquisition
Investigation
Design
Building
Production
Ramp-Up
High
ABILITY
TO INFLUENCE
OUTCOME
Index of
Attention and
Influence
ACTUAL
ACTIVITY
MANAGEMENT
PROFILE
Low

15. And from: Building long term capability Doing strategy Making decisions

16. We call this “The Capability Trap”

17. The Capability Trap
I knew I was trouble when I had to give hourly updates

20. The Capability Trap in Manufacturing
“In the minds of the [operations team leaders] they had to hit their pack counts. This meant if you were having a bad day and your yield had fallen ... you had to run like crazy to hit your target. You could say “you are making 20% garbage, stop the line and fix the problem”, and they would say, “I can’t hit my pack count without running like crazy.” They could never get ahead of the game.”
-- improvement consultant
Confidential, please do not cite or quote without author’s permission.

21. The Capability Trap in Product Development
An engineer might not take the time to document her steps or put the results of a simulation on the bookshelf and because of that she saved engineering time and did her project more efficiently. But in the long run it prevented us from being able to deploy the reusability concepts that we were looking for.
--chief engineer
Confidential, please do not cite or quote without author’s permission.

22. In general…
“I knew I was in trouble when I had to give hourly updates….”

23. Declining Performance
No time
for up front work
Overload
We have to spend a ton of time fixing it…
The stuff we bring to market is…

24. Declining Performance
The people who work for us are lazy
Overload
We need more controls

25. Declining Performance
There’s no time to do strategy
Overload
We can’t
make decisions

26. Declining Performance
No time
for up front work
Overload
We have to spend a ton of time fixing it…
The stuff we bring to market is…

27. What can be done?

28. Recognize you have a problem
There are two theories. One says, "there’s a problem let’s fix it." The other says "we have a problem, someone is screwing up, let’s go beat them up." To make improvement we could no longer embrace the second theory, we had to use the first.

29. Kill project 26!

30. Why is killing project #26 so hard? (Part 1)
It’s a “good” project!
Good managers can meet stretch goals
(and I’m a good manager)
Making difficult decisions takes time & energy
It’s very hard to kill projects without a strategy

31. Why is killing project #26 so hard? (Part 2)
Killing project 26 will give us very serious problems right now…

32. “Worse before better”
Performance
Time

33. * =

34. * =

35. So, all you need to do is: Measure capacity & track resources
Balance long and short term effort
Avoid tipping into firefighting
Develop a strategy & the ability to act
Learn to kill project 26
Face worse before better
Develop the ability to have “high conflict, high respect” decisions

36. What happens on Monday morning?

37. Two case studies
Medtronics
Kirkham Instruments

38. Some Models of Change
The Vision Model (aka, the Field of Dreams model)
Change happens by giving people new ideas
The Document Model
Change happens by writing those new ideas down
The “My Way or the Highway” Model
Change happens by telling people to use the new ideas, watching them closely, and penalizing those that don’t

39. All of these are probably necessary, but none are sufficient
Organizational change efforts don’t produce change unless somebody in the organization actually does something differently
Doing things differently is tough and does not come naturally
Successful change requires:
Understanding how the current situation emerged
Identifying how your behavior (inadvertently) contributed to the current challenges
Taking a disciplined approach to changing (your own) bad habits

40. things that others need to do to allow your new behaviors
“We Should”
things that others need to do to allow your new behaviors
“I Will”
new things you will do
old things you will stop doing

41. Good luck!