Kill Impediment before it kills your Project!

Narendar Choudhary’s Introduction: Narendar has done Bachelors in Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Jaipur and MBA from IMT Ghaziabad. He has more than a decade of experience in IT Project Management and Operations Management. He is PMP Certified and has played pioneer role in launching Samsung Galaxy Phones and Tablets. He has worked for organizations like Samsung and Reliance Jio.

An impediment is anything that slows the team down and delays the completion of project work. Impediments can be anything as mentioned below:

Defects
People issues
Technical issues
Operational issues
External issues
Lack of knowledge and skills
…..

Scenario:
In one of the projects, my client was facing issues related to the project schedule. The project was constantly getting delayed and the team members were losing enthusiasm as the project was progressing. Upon root causing the situation, it was found that due to unreliable internet connectivity, team members were losing approximately 15 minutes per day. Below were the few critical instances when the internet broke down:

a. Vishal was working as a developer upon on one of the most important USP of the premium product. The product was to be shown in the ISC West event of 2019. That feature would have attracted many customers and may even turned out to close deals with some of the customers. Unfortunately, due to poor internet connectivity, Vishal had to work over weekends to complete the feature. Vishal was not happy as he already had some commitments those weekends, which he had to cancel.

b. David, Marketing Manager, was supposed to demo the product in the ISC West event. At run-time, it was supposed to fetch some data from the offshore office. It was very unfortunate that the internet broke down for few minutes when the demo was ongoing. Although, services were resumed shortly but it broke down the tempo and could not generate the desired impact.

There were few more instances which were enough to generate disappointments and negativity among the employees.

Solution:
To remove the impediments, process was designed to identify and remove impediments through below cycle:

Identify impediments – Root caused the issue
Manage impediments – Log the issue to track the progress
Kill impediments – Adopt problem solving approach instead of compromise or avoidance

Every impediment was logged into the common portal, which was accessible to everyone. All team members were encouraged to log the problems they are facing without thinking whether it is small or big. Employees were even encouraged to share what would be the solution and were included into the committee made responsible to resolve the issue. On regular basis, reports were shared with all stakeholders, including higher management and the team so that the impediment logger can see the actual progress on the issue logged by him/her.

Impact:
This activity helped to remove even the smallest of the issue and increased the happiness index and the productivity of the team by 25%. The project timeline was being met without stretching over the weekend or late nights. This also helped in increasing the retention rate and it got drastically increased by 90%.

Conclusion:
As shared by Albert Einstein – “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” We also did the same and found out that there are small problems which lead to the bigger problems. We root caused the problem and resolved the underlying issue which automatically removed other symptoms.