Table of Contents
Table of Figures
Many years ago, I was teaching an executive MBA course in project management. Every other weekend, the class would meet and two of the students had to prepare (to the best of their ability) an executive-level status report on an existing project. In the first class meeting, two of the students volunteered to “get the pain out of the way” and be first to team up and prepare a status report for the next class meeting.
In the next class meeting, they handed out a 15-page status report to each student. I then followed them around the classroom, picked up all of the status reports, and disposed of them in the trash can while the whole class watched. The two students th‘at prepared the reports were quite upset. I then told them to prepare another report for the next class meeting and, if the report had in it a staple or paper clip, I would dispose of it in the same way.
The moral to the story is clear: Executives do not have time to read what’s on their desk already, so why give them too much information in which case they will either refuse to read it or study it with a microscope and find a fault. Executives want the answers to two questions: Where are we today? And where will we end up? Do you really believe this cannot be accomplished on a single sheet of paper? The One-Page Project Manager series of books are encouraging you to do just that. Making this part of your Project Management Methodology will simplify and improve your project communication, especially with busy executives.
—Harold D. Kerzner, PhD
Senior Executive Director
International Institute for Learning, Inc.
Clark Campbell fills a void and bridges a communication gap that has long existed between company executives and project or program managers. OPPM successfully links corporate strategy to those in the trenches managing projects.”
—Dr. Denis R. Petersen, PMP
President and CEO, Milestone Management
Consultants, LLC
Communication may be the single most important critical success factor in project management. I have served as a CIO in 6 high-technology companies over the past 26 years. In this capacity, I have observed many successful, and unsuccessful, projects—including a very successful $30 million SAP/ERP implementation that I participated in using
The One-Page Project Manager. This tool really works! It makes the complex look simpler, facilitates accurate and honest assessments, and all on just one page—which can, and will be, read by even the busiest executive.
—David C. Berg
Retired Chief Information Officer
IBM, Unisys and Sun Microsystems
If you’ve ever needed to manage several projects at once, you know the dilemma: there has to be a better way to track the projects quickly, concisely and reliably, but finding and learning that better way always seems too tedious, costly, or complicated. This book solves that problem.
—Frank Luby
Author, Manage for Profit, not for Market Share
Harvard Business School Press
Partner, Simon-Kucher & Partners, Strategy and
Marketing Consultants
When managing large projects it is easy to lose oneself in gritty details only to wake up and realize that you spent valuable time on the wrong issues. In
The One-Page Project Manager, Clark Campbell reveals a wonderful tool for keeping projects on task. Only one glance and we see the big issues requiring attention. It’s the perfect organizational solution for the executive needing relevant project information.
—Taylor Randall, PhD
Professor, David Eccles School of Business
University of Utah
While at initial glance this book may appear to be simply about developing a “dashboard” for tracking an important project, it soon becomes clear that it is much more than that. The approach outlined by Clark Campbell, an experienced and accomplished project leader, provides a proven process for project management that significantly improves the chances that the project will be completed on time, on budget, and on target for its intended purposes. Furthermore, it provides a straightforward yet compelling set of steps to ensure that those with the ability and responsibility to achieve the desired results are supported, guided, and focused in their efforts to do so. This approach will prove especially beneficial to students and practitioners who want to learn and apply the skills and tools of effective project leadership.
—Steven C. Wheelwright, PhD
Baker Foundation Professor
Senior Associate Dean
Director of Publications Activities
Harvard Business School
Harvard University
This is the most productive method I’ve seen to capture the essence of project management. Not too complicated, not too simple. For those with experience this is certainly a method to adopt for rapid, vivid, and persistent communication. I wish I’d had this years ago, but am glad it came along now. It clearly saves time for an organization’s key resources.
—Paul Germeraad, PhD
President of Intellectual Assets, Inc.
Instructor, Caltech
Impressive in its simplicity, yet universal in its application, the
One-Page Project Manager began assisting Chinese project managers in 2003, when Mr. Campbell first lectured in Beijing. OPPM is easy to learn and use, and is impressive in its clear capacity to communicate. It should be required reading for every manager who wants to improve project performance, accurately tell their story, and do it efficiently.
—Jonathan H. Du, PhD
CEO and Chairman
WiseChina Training Ltd.
Beijing, China
Total Lean Management requires lean communication. Clark Campbell and Mike Collins have presented in this book a powerfully simple communication tool. O.C. Tanner, a Shingo Prize winner, is among the top 3% of Lean companies in North America. Their distinctive combination of OPPM with Toyota’s A3 report reveals a unique continuous improvement, one which documents, in part, how they have executed their strategy to achieve market dominance and profitable growth.
—Ross E. Robson, PhD
Strategic Founder and Executive
Director of the Shingo Prize (retired),
and President, DnR Lean LLC
FOREWORD
Clark Campbell has been my friend and colleague for over 20 years. We met on the soccer sideline watching, then driving, then coaching our kids through this phase of our lives. As I spent significant parts of 11 Thanksgiving vacations on long, soccer-related road trips with Clark, I came to appreciate his analytic mind and his incessant search for better ways to run things generally and projects specifically.
One day I accepted his invitation to observe the status of a new facility he was directing. It was my first acquaintance with the one-page project manager (OPPM). My first exposure to OPPM was a private tutorial from Clark Campbell. He was rightfully enthusiastic, and I was sincerely impressed with the elegant simplicity, breadth, and capacity of this one-page system. Given our history, it did not surprise me that Clark had found a better way to track, trace, and create accountability.
Simultaneous with the development of OPPM, I entered government service. I ultimately joined Governor Mike Leavitt, a three-term governor of Utah, as his chief of staff, first in his governor’s office, then as he became administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and finally as he served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A few metrics are helpful in explaining the size and scope of HHS. With over 67,000 employees and a federal budget exceeding $700 billion, HHS would rank as the 4th or 5th largest economy in the world.
A chief of staff is, in part, a COO, a problem solver, and the implementer of his boss’s agenda and priorities. At each new venue Mike Leavitt and I created a document of our vision (a 500-day plan with a 5,000-day horizon), out of which typically grew immense, expansive projects. Our application of basic project planning into our large strategic government policy initiatives was, I think, unique.
As an example, the projects at HHS included national and international preparedness for pandemic influenza. This included a preparedness summit in each state, the reintroduction of the vaccine industry in the United States, and efforts to encourage personal, business, institutional, and governmental preparedness. We organized the Value Driven Health Care initiative, created a national collaboration for health information technology, drove public and global health initiatives, organized a personalized medicine initiative, and pushed the ethic of prevention.
Each of these was a huge national or international undertaking. Each was dynamic and continually evolving. Each required remarkable collaborative planning and execution. For each of these HHS projects we chose the OPPM as an integral tool to reflect our status, identify barriers, determine next steps, and make necessary adjustments. Through our monthly report utilizing OPPM I was updated clearly and effectively on each of these initiatives. Armed with my OPPM, my monthly report to the secretary was made immeasurably easier, more straightforward, and more accurate.
Our execution with OPPM was far from perfect, but our outcomes, our communication, our capacity for thoughtful deliberation, and our ability to make adjustments were significantly improved by so effectively consolidating large amounts of information in a concise and easy-to-translate way.
I can imagine larger projects than those that we engaged in, but not a place where there would be 11 of such magnitude going simultaneously. I can’t imagine trying to keep track of all of it without the proper tools, and for us the OPPM was a key component. It is great to know that there is an organizational genius like Clark Campbell among us. Simply stated, our use of OPPM helped us keep a lot of things airborne and on target.
I suppose a postscript of sorts is in order. After 16 years in public service, in the case of Secretary Leavitt, and 12 for me, we started Leavitt Partners, where we advise and invest in companies that we think are positioning themselves for the world we hope to see. A key part of each client relationship is the development of an OPPM.
—RICH MCKEOWN
President and CEO
Leavitt Partners, LLC
Throughout my 30 years of operations and leadership experience, I have sought out philosophies and tools that could advance my organizations. Quality circles, just-in-time, statistical process control, Six Sigma, Lean, and many more practices have made their impacts with varying degrees of success.
I now realize an important principle: the more people involved in problem solving and process improvement, the faster the progress. Although we have learned to use many of the Lean tools at O.C. Tanner Co., it seems to me that simple tools can be the most useful means for helping every person contribute.
The difficulty has been that project-management disciplines have not been simple. Some might say that only professional project managers, engineers, and upper management can plan and implement a project. They might believe that project management is a complicated discipline not easily taught to people on the floor.
Given its ease of use and understandable structure, The One-Page Project Manager is a welcome solution to this complexity. We train managers and team members to use it. It has enabled people on the floor to manage their own kaizen projects. They have applied its project disciplines and simple communication capabilities to plan schedules, meet objectives, define responsibility, manage work, and report status. With it in our Lean tool kit, we have tapped into the creativity of our people to pump up productivity, cut cycle times, slash work in process (WIP), trim floor space, deliver on time better than ever, and drive product and service quality to be world-class.
In The One-Page Project Manager for Execution, Clark Campbell and Mike Collins present how OPPM works in conjunction with strategy deployment. They illustrate use of A3s and OPPMs to document how projects align to a strategic vision. These tools work together to make sure a strategy is clearly understood throughout an organization, and that the progress of supporting projects can be monitored easily.
With our emphasis on building a culture of continuous improvement and respect for people, OPPM has become a simple but invaluable tool for our people as they refine and strengthen our business. Enjoy the book and empower your people to use it!
—HAROLD SIMONS
Executive Vice President, Supply Chain,
O.C. Tanner Company
Member of the Shingo Prize Board of Governors
Recipient of the Shingo Prize for
Manufacturing Excellence, 1999
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To our associates at the O.C. Tanner Company and the American Shizuki Corporation, who, together with their leaders, provided the learning laboratory from which the thoughts and simple methods articulated in this book emerged, evolved, were verified, and then were extended to other organizations.
To the astute team at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., including Shannon Vargo, Beth Zipko, and Deborah Schindlar, who executed this book project with diligence and wisdom.
Special appreciation is extended to Kent Murdock, whose vision and encouragement made this and the other OPPM books possible, and to Yasuhiko Kajikawa, a personal mentor and leading sensei of lean thinking.
CLARK A. CAMPBELL
MICHAEL J. COLLINS
INTRODUCTION
In my first two books, The One-Page Project Manager and The One-Page Project Manager for IT Projects, I covered in detail the thinking behind this valuable tool for project managers and how to construct one. In this book, I, together with Mike Collins, will expand the audience to include executives and leaders responsible for executing strategy. We will discuss how to add OPPM™ to the Toyota one-page A3 report and give specific examples of how these communication tools help drive strategy and solve problems in a remarkably simple way.
The one-page project manager (or OPPM) was developed in the early 1990s at the O.C. Tanner Company in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was first used in a $10 million construction and computer system project to build an automated distribution center and then on a growing number of projects over more than a decade. By 1997, Mike Collins joined the Tanner team, bringing with him his 20 years of experience with the Toyota production system. I would call Mike a Lean expert, yet he would say he is still simply a student. Mike was vice president and general manager of the American Shizuki Corporation, moved on to WorldTech Consulting in Southeast Asia, and now, in addition to his appointment as vice president of Lean enterprise development for O.C. Tanner, he continues to teach graduate courses on Lean principles at Westminster College.
It was Mike who first suggested that OPPM would be a powerful visual tool to efficiently communicate all the information contained on the right side of the one-page Toyota A3 report. Mike has put his idea to work with hundreds of problem-solving projects over the past 10 years. It was the success (unexpected even to Mike) of his work using OPPM and A3 to solve problems and drive strategy that provided the impetus for this book. People in manufacturing, and more recently across the enterprise, were executing the strategy because they were both conversant with and aligned to their required elements. OPPM and A3 communicated the right information to the right people at the right time to not only monitor, but to reinforce and reward getting the right things done—yes, execution!
THE KEY:
Execution, with simple communication.
Sun Tzu would say, “good execution is the foundation of good strategy, and great execution increases strategic options.” (See Sun Tzu for Execution, by Steven W. Michaelson.) And even more simply stated, “Strategies most often fail because they aren’t executed well.” See Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.
Edward Tufte is professor emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence and information design. In his remarkable book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, he says, “Often the most effective way to describe, explore, and summarize a set of numbers—even a very large set—is to look at pictures of those numbers. Furthermore, of all methods for analyzing and communicating statistical information, well-designed data graphics are usually the simplest and at the same time the most powerful.”
Einstein is reputed to have said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
THE GUIDING PRINCIPLE:
Be as simple as is practicable.
Practicable is precisely the right word here. Not just as simple as possible, but as simple as practicable. Practicable has roots in Medieval Latin (practicabilis—capable of being used) and Greek (praktikos—fit for action). Synonyms would include achievable, attainable, feasible, executable.
Peter Drucker reminds us that “Management by Objectives works—if you know the objectives. Unfortunately, 90 percent of the time you don’t.” OPPM™/A3s secure a project to a strategic purpose, plan the critical elements, and then easily communicate performance of the key variables.
THE PROCESS:
Communication
Finally, before we launch into the specifics of OPPM and A3s, a word about communication. I have had the privilege to travel and speak together with two other authors in the “Three Nationally Renowned Best Selling Authors in the Project Management” series sponsored by the Project Management Resource Group. Michael J. Cunningham, president and founder of the Harvard Computing Group, writes in his book, Finish What You Start, “One of the most complex issues about larger-scale project management is visualizing what is happening. Communication may be time consuming and might not appear to produce immediate results, but trust me, this is the big one.” Andy Crowe, author of Alpha Project Managers: What the Top 2% Know that Everyone Else Does Not, says, “Of all the attributes that separate the Alpha group from their peers, communication presents the most striking difference.”
This book has been written to stand on its own without referring back to the previous two OPPM books. To that end, we have revised, refined, and included material from the other books.
Chapter 1 explains the links and ties of OPPM to strategy. With a little personal history, you will see how OPPM, first designed as a simple project management tool, found its way into Lean practices, Toyota methods, and finally strategy deployment.
While presenting the essential elements of the first OPPM book to a Board of Directors, one board member wryly asked if I had a “one-page version” of the book. Chapter 2 is an attempt to summarize that first book. You will see how to construct and report using the OPPM and be given a few tips to ensure it gets used. OPPMs can be used alone or in conjunction with a Toyota A3 report to both drive strategy and solve problems. It has been said, “a problem is a project in disguise.” Chapter 3 provides specific examples of how OPPM was used to help plan, staff, direct, control, and communicate a project to secure ISO certification.
Chapter 4 introduces the Toyota A3 report with its connections to scientific method and Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. We will then reexamine the ISO example in Chapter 5, bringing OPPM into the A3 report.
The project management office is essential to Lean execution. Chapter 6 discusses how OPPM supports the eight fundamental responsibilities of your PMO. We share with you the Project Office Template, or OPPM, which summarizes the top-priority projects and links them to both strategy and annual operating plans.
Chapter 7 brings the power and simplicity of A3 into the strategy deployment process. You will see actual examples of the OPPM/A3 cascades from the corporate level out through the business-function level to the team level.
We move beyond strategy to solving specific problems using OPPM/A3 in Chapter 8. You will see how these tools facilitate continuous improvement and how they amplify the “respect for people,” requirement of the Toyota business system.
Because OPPM and A3 are so simple and so visual, a few thoughts from the experts would be appropriate to conclude this introduction.
“At every step we’ve noted the need for managers to see . . . to bring perfection into
clear view so the objective of improvement is
visible and real.”
“Lean thinking is a series of
simple but counterintuitive ideas. . . .”
—JAMES P. WOMACK & DANIEL T. JONES Authors of Lean Thinking, and the first to use the word “Lean”
“The most time-consuming and difficult way to understand complex ideas is to have to decipher a lengthy report . . . more efficient is the visual approach . . . people are visually oriented, new employees at Toyota learn to communicate with as few words as possible and with visual aids. The A3 report is a key part of the process.”
—JEFFREY K. LIKER Author of The Toyota Way