Operational Effectiveness: ‘Assessment and Improvement of a Project Planning Tool’

There is a time when a leader should define the strategy to follow by their teams or companies when new threats appear. The current worldwide economic situation has forced lots of organisations to redefine their strategies. Radical changes with big investments, modifying the whole processes, are usually risky and their likely outcomes are potentially unpredictable. Conversely, some organisations decide to solve problems as they appear by means of small adjustments. In these cases, the concern is that the impacts of the changes are easily hidden as the environment of the issue has not changed; focusing on the details makes the framework invisible. The spread of the ‘Lean sigma’ methodologies has promoted the implementation of continuous assessments on the operational effectiveness. This strategy balances the abovementioned approaches, low investments are used to study the level of performance and the linked factors with potential impact on our organisation. This is to mean, less economic risk and better change. The key factor, and major difficulty, is to understand stakeholders’ needs and links. In order to create the whole picture, transferable skills are requested to collect information from different points of view in the same process or company. This paper includes a case study to show a way to implement this ´Lean sigma´ methodology. The company on the example had already successfully tested this type of procedures. Because of this, the previous creation of a tool to support the Project Management performance led to the definition of this project. The implementation of the tool requested an identification of its real impact on the processes and employees. The work behind this paper has not only involved the assessment of the tool but also has taken it to the next step with the development of an improved version.Outgoin