The projects have daily pulse meetings at which the participants in the active project teams decide what activities they need to do in order to make progress. The project teams are self-organized and self-governed.
Moving post-it notes in the activity window and putting up yellow, red and green magnets in the synchronization plan is done by the project team members (not the project manager).
The project manager records decisions in the decision log. The project manager also ensures that finished activities are marked as completed in the activity plan.
Each project follows its own unique value flow described in the synchronization plan. However, the synchronization plan does not stipulate what work to be done, only what sub-results are to be achieved and how these relate to each other. Each sub-result in the synchronization plan is planned with several smaller activities in an activity plan.
How to perform project pulse meeting – pulse meeting agenda
Step 1. Daily project pulse meetings
The project pulse meetings follow the four basic steps below. Decisions that are made during the meetings are documented in the decision log by the project manager.
Show progress. The project members move post-it notes with completed activities from “In progress” to “Done”. The participants also shortly explain what they have done so that the whole project team understands what has been completed and how that influences how other activities must be resolved.
Act on problems. Identify any obstacles and other unexpected difficulties. Write them on post-it notes and put them in “Inbox”. In order to avoid waste, these obstacles must be addressed as soon as possible. They will otherwise obstruct the progress, forcing the project into a situation where sub-results must be redone, which will cause delays. Add activities in the Activity plan to deal with the problems.
Prioritize new activities. Add new activities from the activity plans written on post-it notes to “To Do”.
Decide what to do next. The team’s members select what activities they will do next. It is important to allow everyone to clearly explain what work they intend to do. Some team members have ongoing activities with post-it notes already placed under “In Progress”. Others will pick new activities from “To Do” and put them under “In Progress”.
Step 2. Weekly at project pulse meetings before the program pulse meetings
The points below are discussed in a project pulse meeting before the weekly scheduled program pulse meeting.
Need for decisions. Problems that will require management attention and their decisions are identified based on the content in the “Inbox”. Mark these problems with a yellow magnet. The project manager will bring up these problems at the program pulse meeting.
Resource requirements are updated. The project manager will bring resource requests to the program pulse meeting.
Step 3. Weekly at project pulse meetings after the program pulse meetings
Report the project’s health.
Check if any actions are needed in preparation for next week.
Empty the “Done” area.
Visualization
Use a whiteboard that has roughly the size 1.5 x 1.5 meter. To visualize the chain of events and the flow of activities that are done, an area on the board is marked up with “Inbox”, “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Done”. Activities are here displayed as post-it notes.
When work with an activity is to be started, it is posted as a post-it note in “To Do”. When someone in the project team starts working on the activity, the post-it note is moved to “In Progress”. When the activity is finished, the post-it note is moved to “Done”.
Activities are initiated from the activity plans, but also from problems or unexpected events. Actions related to problems have priority over the planned activities. Use yellow post-it notes for planned activities and red post-it notes for activities related to problems so that you can differentiate between the two.
Parmatur Pulse by Parmatur HB is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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