Tactical Planning In Project Management

All planning is NOT the same. This infographic shows demand vs supply vs capacity planning: Main Objective ↳ Demand: forecast customer demand ↳ Supply: plan how to meet forecasted demand ↳ Capacity: ensure resources can meet the supply plan Type of Planning ↳ Demand: unconstrained ↳ Supply: constrained by materials, suppliers, production ↳ Capacity: constrained by labor, equipment, shifts, plant availability When in the S&OP Cycle ↳ Demand: demand review ↳ Supply: supply review ↳ Capacity: supply review Input ↳ Demand: sales data, market trends, promotions, historical demand ↳ Supply: demand forecast, inventory levels, supply constraints ↳ Capacity: supply plan, production rates, shift schedules, resource calendars Output ↳ Demand: forecasted demand  ↳ Supply: supply plan including procurement and production schedules ↳ Capacity: capacity plan (available vs. required capacity by period) Key Deliverable to S&OP ↳ Demand: aligned consensus forecast ↳ Supply: feasible supply plan ↳ Capacity: confirmation of capacity readiness or gaps Metrics ↳ Demand: forecast accuracy (MAPE, WMAPE), bias ↳ Supply: OTIF, inventory turns, service level ↳ Capacity: capacity utilization %, available hours, OEE Any others to add?

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Methods – Overview, Comparison & Tips 🔍 In quality, safety, engineering, and problem-solving domains, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a cornerstone of sustainable improvement. Here’s a quick overview and comparison of the top RCA methods, their strengths, and where they shine: 🎯 Popular RCA Tools & Techniques: ❶5 Whys – Simple yet powerful. Keep asking “why” to drill down to the root cause. ✅ Quick, intuitive | ❌ May oversimplify complex issues ❷Fishbone (Ishikawa) Diagram – Visualizes potential causes across categories (People, Methods, Machines, etc.) ✅ Great for brainstorming | ❌ Needs team consensus ❸Pareto Analysis – Based on the 80/20 rule. Focuses on the most frequent causes. ✅ Prioritization | ❌ Doesn’t show causality ❹FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) – Proactive method to assess risk of potential failures. ✅ Risk-based | ❌ Time-consuming ❺Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) – Logical, top-down approach using boolean logic. ✅ Detailed and structured | ❌ Requires expertise ❻DMAIC (Six Sigma) – Structured problem-solving (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control). ✅ Data-driven | ❌ Can be resource-heavy ❼8D (Eight Disciplines) – Team-based, process-driven RCA with containment and corrective action. ✅ Widely used in automotive/manufacturing | ❌ May be too rigid for some issues ❽Shainin Red X Method – Focuses on dominant cause using progressive elimination. ✅ Fast for repetitive issues | ❌ Less known, needs training ❾Bowtie Analysis – Combines risk assessment with RCA, visualizing threats, controls, and consequences. ✅ Holistic | ❌ More qualitative ❿Cause & Effect Matrix – Prioritizes inputs based on impact on key outputs (CTQs). ✅ Links causes to outcomes | ❌ Needs solid process understanding ⓫AI/ML-Based RCA – Uses data mining and algorithms to detect patterns and predict root causes. ✅ Scalable, modern | ❌ Requires quality data & digital maturity 🔥 Challenges in Using RCA: -Bias and assumptions -Lack of data or poor data quality -Over-reliance on a single tool -Team misalignment -Skipping validation of root cause(s) 🧿 New Additions & Tips: ✅ Combine methods: e.g., Fishbone + 5 Whys or Pareto + FMEA ✅ Train teams on when/how to use each tool ✅ Always validate the root cause with data/evidence ✅ Document learnings for future prevention ✅ Embrace digital tools where appropriate 🧭 Choosing the Right RCA Tool: Ask yourself: ✔ Is the problem complex or simple? ✔ Do we have data? ✔ Is time a constraint? ✔ Are multiple stakeholders involved? ✔ Is this recurring or a one-time issue? 📊 Sometimes, a hybrid approach works best! 📢 What RCA tool do you use most often, and why? Share your experience or tips in the comments! ====== 🔔 Consider following me at Govind Tiwari,PhD #RootCauseAnalysis #QualityManagement #ContinuousImprovement #ProblemSolving #LeanSixSigma #FMEA #8D #DMAIC #Shainin #AIinQuality #CQI #QMS #RiskManagement #OperationalExcellence

Stop answering what's asked, Answer what's meant instead: When someone asks, "How's the project going?" most respond, "It's fine." But great leaders know this surface-level question masks deeper concerns: • "Should I be worried?" • "Are we meeting our goals?" • "When will I get the next update?" • "Do you need help?" Surface-level responses miss opportunities to: • Build trust through transparency • Provide actionable clarity • Demonstrate ownership • Address unspoken concerns Worse, vague answers breed doubt, cause churn, and trigger unnecessary escalations. Here's what to do instead: 1/ If you know the person: Use your understanding of their concerns and priorities. For example: • “It’s on track. We’re dialing up milestone M1 on Tuesday as planned. Our next status update is scheduled for Wednesday.” 2/ If you don’t know the person well: Provide an answer and invite clarity (demonstrates ownership). For example: • “The project is on track for delivery by XX/YY, and I’ve attached our latest bi-weekly update. Are there specific areas or concerns you’d like me to address?” Answering the question behind the question is a leadership superpower. PS: Questions are icebergs—90% lies beneath the surface. --- Follow me, tap the (🔔) Omar Halabieh for daily Leadership and Career posts.

Budgeting ≠ Cutting down expenses Instead, it is about making smarter financial decisions that fuel growth, whether for your finances or business. But did you know there are different ways to build a budget? Here are four methods and when to use them:  → Incremental Budgeting –  This is the simplest and most common budgeting method. It works by taking last year’s budget and adjusting it slightly based on expected changes (inflation, growth, cost increases).  → Activity-Based Budgeting (ABB) - Instead of just tweaking last year’s numbers, ABB starts from scratch and links every cost to a specific business activity. It helps businesses optimize spending by understanding what truly drives costs.  → Value Proposition Budgeting – This method ensures every budget item contributes to the company’s value proposition. If an expense doesn’t add value to customers, employees, or stakeholders, it’s questioned or cut.  → Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) - ZBB requires every expense to be justified from scratch, rather than assuming past expenses should continue. It’s a powerful way to eliminate inefficiencies and ensure spending aligns with strategic goals.  Each approach has its pros and cons and the best method depends on your goals and business model. Some companies even use a mix of these methods for different departments.  Have you tried any of these methods? #personalfinance

Do your project reports suffer from the watermelon effect? 🍉 I've seen this happen in many companies. At the end of the month, it's time to update the project status for the department review meeting. The project leader gathers updates on milestones, previews what’s next, and then updates a slide in the shared PowerPoint deck. Finally, the status is marked: Green ✅. But here's the thing—rarely do people step up and say, "We’re off track." Even when that’s the reality, they often stay silent. Why? Well, there are a few reasons: 😬 There’s pressure to stay on schedule, so teams hope to fix things next month before anyone notices. They might fear the consequences of calling out a “red status.” 📊 Sometimes, project leaders just don’t know the real status. Without solid metrics, they might assume things are on track. ⏳ There's no time for deep reporting. Project leaders are busy keeping stakeholders happy, leaving little time to dive into the data and figure out the true status. 🚩 And sometimes, the signs are just ignored. It’s tough to admit that the team isn’t on track or that early assumptions were off. The problem is that this often leads to a nasty surprise when the project turns red right before it’s supposed to ship, and suddenly, the deadline slips by six months. This is bad news for everyone involved—team members, leadership, and customers alike. 😱 This is the watermelon effect: The project looks green on the outside, but if you slice it open, it’s red on the inside. 🍉 You need an open, honest, and blameless culture to avoid this. Here are a few tips to help: 🔍 Don’t just read the project status in meetings—ask deeper questions to really understand what’s going on beneath the surface. 📈 Set up better metrics and more frequent milestones so your status updates are based on real data, not just a gut feeling. 🚀 Report more often. It’s easier to say you’re “At risk” for a couple of weeks and then get back on track. It’s less dramatic than turning red for a whole quarter and helps you get help earlier. 🎉 Celebrate honesty when things aren’t going as planned. Highlighting slipping deadlines can actually help other projects, so yours isn’t seen as the exception. It’s a bit wild to expect a six-month project involving multiple departments and dozens of people to hit the exact deadline and outcome as planned. Plans are just that—plans. They change when they hit reality. So, admit it early and avoid the watermelon effect. 🍉🚫

Understanding your Processes is the key to Strategy Execution! The key to executing your strategy is achieving alignment—ensuring that all elements of your business, including strategy, organizational structure, processes, and technology, are orchestrated to support long-term success. Yet, many organizations struggle with execution because while leadership defines strategy, the connection to execution gets lost: Practitioners lack clarity on how their roles contribute to strategic goals, leading to misalignment and inefficiencies Complexity breeds poor communication and silos, making cross-functional coordination difficult Disconnected people, processes, and technology obscure impact analysis and make it challenging to measure progress effectively How can organizations overcome this? By establishing a structured, continuously maintained Inventory of processes within a Process Taxonomy—an essential foundation for alignment and execution. A well-defined Process Inventory provides: A business-oriented lens to pinpoint the impact of change with precision A common language that enables effective collaboration across teams Traceability & transparency, ensuring alignment from strategy to execution A single source of truth for understanding organizational intelligence and resources Clear accountability and ownership for both change initiatives and ongoing operations A feedback mechanism that equips strategy leaders with real-time insights into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). To deliver on this alignment, organizations must invest in building a Process Capability—one that enables them to create, maintain, and evolve their process knowledge over time. The cost of not doing this? Wasted transformation investments, frustrated customers, and lost competitive advantage when execution fails to deliver on strategic objectives. To learn more about this framework and approach, check out my book https://a.co/d/1ajgWhI Would love to hear your thoughts—what challenges have you faced when driving execution on strategy?

Ever wondered how a real AI project actually works ? A successful AI project goes through 7 structured steps, each led by different experts. From defining the business problem to continuous improvement after deployment, every role plays a part in making AI work in the real world. Here’s a cheat sheet that breaks down the end-to-end AI project lifecycle with clear steps, leaders, and responsibilities. ✅ AI Project Steps Covered: 🔹Step 1: Defining the Problem → Led by business analysts & product managers. Identify real problems, set objectives, align business & tech needs. 🔹Step 2: Preparing the Data → Led by data engineers & analysts. Collect raw data, clean, standardize, and split into training, validation, and test sets. 🔹Step 3: Building the Model → Led by ML engineers & data scientists. Choose algorithms, engineer features, train models, tune hyperparameters, and compare best fits. 🔹Step 4: Testing & Evaluation → Led by data scientists & ML researchers. Validate with unseen data, use metrics (accuracy, recall, AUC), stress-test, and decide if model is production-ready. 🔹Step 5: Deployment → Led by MLOps engineers & software developers. Package models into APIs, use Docker/Kubernetes, integrate with apps, enable predictions, and ensure reliability before going live. 🔹Step 6: Validation & Monitoring → Led by validators, ethicists, QA teams. Monitor accuracy, detect drift, check bias, log failures, and trigger alerts if performance drops. 🔹Step 7: Continuous Improvement → Led by data scientists, PMs, domain experts. Gather feedback, add new data sources, retrain, optimize pipelines, and push regular updates. Save this guide and share with others, and hopefully this will help to understand how AI projects work, step by step, role by role! #AI

If your dashboard doesn’t answer these 3 questions in under 60 seconds, it’s not helping. Project managers aren’t just building reports. We’re building visibility. We’re building alignment. We’re building trust. And too often, dashboards turn into data dumps that no one actually reads. I’ve learned this the hard way: when stakeholders don’t get what they need from your dashboard, they default to side messages, follow-up meetings, or worse, silence. That's why every dashboard should focus on just three main questions: 1. What’s on track? Let them see wins at a glance. It builds confidence. Example: “Frontend 95% done, UAT still on track for Friday.” 2. What’s at risk? Call out blockers early, before they spiral. Example: “Testing delayed due to vendor handoff, patch in motion.” 3. What needs a decision? Make choices visible so momentum doesn’t stall. Example: “Scope change approval needed, will push timeline 3 days.” Dashboards are not just for project status. They’re built with stakeholders in mind, designed to match how they think, decide, and act. And when done right? They reduce status meetings. They cut back confusion. They show stakeholders exactly what they need, when they need it. Because clarity doesn’t come from more data. It comes from asking better questions. → Found this helpful? Repost ♺ and follow Jesus Romero for grounded PM frameworks that elevate clarity and trust.

Here’s what you often wont hear about project debriefs. Most lessons learned sessions feel busy but teams still don’t see outputs. At Mayfair IT we keep our After Action Reviews (ARR) simple. We understand these three points. 1. What actually happened? 2. What helped or got in the way? 3. What will we do differently next time? This simple approach’s helps us focus on outcomes. I remember two moments that saved us time and money: - An engineer pointed out we were designing for executives instead of end users. We switched focus early and tasks from failing sprit a caught up with the timeline. - A tester flagged that QA sprints were planned after cutover. We changed the order and the weekend launch since stayed on track. The point of a review is not to revisit the past but to improve the next delivery. #DigitalDelivery #ProjectLeadership #ContinuousImprovement

𝗪𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗕𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁? 𝗔𝘀𝗸 3 𝗕𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. Enterprise Architects aren’t just mapmakers. 𝗪𝗲’𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. But alignment isn’t a document. 𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻—one that too often gets delayed or diluted. Start it today. And lead with questions that build both 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼-𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽. 𝟯 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗗𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 ✅ 𝟭. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝟯–𝟱 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀? When the destination is unclear, alignment becomes impossible. This question surfaces the real drivers of change—growth targets, operating model shifts, market repositioning. It forces leadership to clarify the “why” before jumping to the “how.” ➡️ Use this to uncover strategic themes worth architecting around. ✅ 𝟮. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀? This isn’t about justifying the EA team. It’s about repositioning architecture as a strategic 𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗿—not just a governance layer. Think: 🔹 Structuring modernization roadmaps 🔹 Prioritizing capabilities that matter 🔹 De-risking transformation with smarter sequencing ➡️ Frame EA as execution infrastructure—not overhead. ✅ 𝟯. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗲 𝗮𝗶𝗺 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗲𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿? Alignment without outcomes is performative. Use this to anchor initiatives to measurable value like cost efficiency, time-to-market, CX improvement, risk reduction. It changes the dynamic from “EA wants alignment” to: “𝗪𝗲’𝗿𝗲 𝗷𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀.” ➡️ Shift the mindset from agreement to ownership. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹? Not just aligning plans, 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼-𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝘀𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆? --- ➕ Follow Kevin Donovan 🔔 ♻️ Repost | 💬 Comment | 👍 Like 🚀 Join 𝐀𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬’ 𝐇𝐮𝐛 – our newsletter & community to enhance skills, meet peers, and level-up your architecture career! Subscribe 👉 https://lnkd.in/dgmQqfu2