Passenger Train Manufacturing Governance
Visual management enables collaboration across language and cultural barriers
- 3 minutes read
The Victorian State Government awarded our client a contract to design and manufacture 65 passenger trains with an international partner. The contract required a series of key deliverables to be met during the design and development phase to trigger payment milestones and avoid significant financial penalties.
With early program slippage due to a delayed award and significant challenges arising from the workgroup-level language barrier, the client recognised that delivering the extremely complex program on time would be difficult. With the project’s success and the company’s brand at risk, the client recognised the need to increase transparency of progress and accountability for departmental execution through its project controls and reporting system.
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The approach
ORBIZ was engaged to develop a holistic visual management system that would drive the successful delivery of the project through transparency and accountability in engineering and procurement and across the senior leadership team.
A detailed analysis was initially conducted to understand the key metrics and measures required to deliver the project and meet the contractual requirements. The program was dissected to enable the development of meaningful activity schedules for each function and primary deliverables so they could be subsequently measured and reported through detailed schedules and KPIs.
The solutions
The leadership team developed a Visual Performance Centre (VPC) in a traditional ‘war room’ setting through which all key activities could be managed and reported. Regular meetings were established as a forum for workstream leads to provide an update on progress and performance.
A VPC was also established as a forum for engineering teams to track and monitor their daily progress to increase ownership and accountability across the wider project team. This process enabled issues to be managed at the frontline and minimised the number of problems that go undetected or are unnecessarily escalated to the leadership team.
Team engagement and communication increased, with visual management techniques essential in enabling effective collaboration between teams with significant linguistic and cultural differences.
A highly customised VPC format was developed for this environment, enabling everyone to effectively speak the same project language.
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