Why are our projects always running late?

The reason your projects are constantly running late is because of the push to get more work done.

Managers see an idle worker, or idle team, and they see waste. They go about remediating that waste by assigning more work.

That worker was idle because of blocked flow, and an indetermine wait time to become unblocked. Now that worker has additional work that takes them away from the original work.

When the original work becomes unblocked, it is now blocked again because the worker is focussed on the new work.

Each time we try to increase the utilisation of teams and individuals, we delay the in-progress work. Work is being delayed and blocked, and all of this adds up to delayed projects.

We can see idle workers. We can't see idle work. We solve the problem we can see, and ignore the one we can't see.

The solution is to make blocked work visible, and to continuously unblock work. And also to stop aiming for maximum utilisation.

Project-orientation optimises for resource utilisation.

Flow-orientation optimises for value delivery.