Program Management

Ohayo Gozaimasu!

Here is a quick recap of covered topics:

Value Engineering and Kaizen Costing, The Make or Buy Decision, Baka Yoke and One Piece Flow, and Total Productive and Preventative Maintenance.

Next Topics to be covered:

Inventory and Supply Chain Management, Dr. Deming and other Giants of the Industry, Theory of Constraints, Aggregate Master Planning, Forecasting, Operation and Production Planning, Linear Programing, Quality Control, Process Layout, and other interesting topics in management

Today, however, I want to briefly go over my role as a Program Manager and why this position is vital to company success.  

As a Program Manager, I fill many different roles but the most important is to set the project managers up for success. Project Managers, rightfully want to push for their project to be on time and under budget; however, what generally happens without oversight is it hurts the organization as a whole. The truth is there are limited resources in every company and those resources should be allocated according to what makes the company most profitable (now and in the future). This is called local optima vs. system performance. 

A fun example of this is to look at how many great basketball players have never won a championship or how a team with a couple great scorers can loose the championship. This happens all the time, think Los Angeles Lakers 2004 (four all-stars vs. Pistons Team), 2006 (Kobe averaged 35.6 Pts. per game and they lost in the first round of the playoffs) and Miami Heat 2011 (Three Superstars vs. Dallas Team and One Superstar). Phil Jackson and his 11 championships is a great Program Manager! One can see why industrial engineers are typically promoted to program manager from the project manager level and why they are a perfect fit. Forget about local optima, think System Performance!  

So, as a program manager, it is my responsibility to find ways to make the project managers successful, especially if their area is affecting all other areas. When reading my blog it is always advantageous to equate these thoughts into other areas of life. For instance, a stay at home Mom is an excellent example of a program manager. How she manages her families resources could lead to family success or family bankruptcy.

Some of the tools we use to make these important decisions are what I go over in these blogs. The make or buy decision, forecasting, and parametric programing are used whenever planning for a future project takes place. Decisions like should we carry a maintenance staff? How many? How should we create our manufacturing line? How can we increase yields on our products? Should we even produce this product? Where should employees go and how many do we need? What materials need to be ordered and at what interval and quantity? Once the materials arrive, where should the go?What is the best way to layout the facility (manufacturing line, inventory etc).

The good news is that through many years of trial and error we as humans have found creative ways to answer these questions. This process is not static; however, but very dynamic in how it evolves over time.

What is interesting is that project managers face a lot of these same questions but in more of a microcosm because the program manager already created the program for them. However, they are responsible for meeting the program requirements so they must plan, organize, direct, and control company resources in order to meet their short-term goals or directives. They implement the plan that the program manager gives them that normally was approved by upper management (General Manager, Vice President, and President).

I have found through both experience and education that if timelines, budget goals, sqft/mnhr rates, yield rates, production rates, and other key performance indicators are not being met it is not the fault of the workers but of the system. Therefore, I take my position very seriously because I am not only setting up the project managers for success or fail but all the workers, and company (the bottom line) as well.

One of the many day to day decisions that are made by Program Managers are which projects needs certain human and material resources when both are normally in short supply. Just remember, the company program is all encompassing and includes all individual and system wide systems. These systems are what the program manager engineers and manages on a day to day basis.Which in previous blogs you have learned how to do :) We will go over more in the coming months in this Blog because in the end Kaizen is what really matters and if done right Kaikaku is the result!

Ok now on to Inventory and Supply Chain Management…

Cheers,

Scott Lager