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In today’s episode I am talking with Kristine Hayes Munson, PMP.

Kristine was my first ever interview guest and she has been on the program several times since then. She has come back because of some recent developments on her team: They have had some layoffs and her team lost a number of people. “How do you deal with that?” is the question of the day and many of you may have to go through a similar situation.

You might be leading a project team that loses some of its members or, like Kristine, you might be the manager of a team of project managers and the economy is forcing you to shrink. Kristine and I talk about the approach that she has found effective in helping your team cope with this situation.

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This is the first of four special episode of The PM Podcast where we introduce you to the Manager Tools approach to Project Management. Here is what Mark and Mike have to say about this episode:

In this cast we describe Horstman's Law of Project Management: Who Does What By When.

We've talked and joked about it many times, and this cast will put to rest the details of Horstman's Law of Project Management (HLPM). Mark came up with it several years ago, to help a group of young managers get over their fear of working on fairly complex software development projects. It was actually born over a dinner at Mexican restaurant in Dallas!

The concept is simple: all projects are simply tasks, done by people, within certain time frames. Despite all protestations to the contrary, no matter how complex the project, they all boil down to who is responsible for doing something, what they're responsible for, and when they have to have it done by. Complex tools can be helpful, but only on really large projects (and almost nobody looks at them anyway ;-) ).

Keep it simple with HLPM. Here's how.

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This episode is is a continuation of last week's discussion with Eric Landes on how to use Kanban in Project Management. Last time we looked at the theory of Kanban and today we look at the practice. Specifically we are going to discuss how Eric introduced Kanban in their department at Robert Bosch as a case study.

We’ll start out with the overall goal they had set themselves and then move pretty quickly to the hands on of how it was implemented, how the team received the change, how the customer received the change, the learning curve, the metrics used, improvements as compared to before and Eric will also give you his recommendations of what worked and what didn’t work for them so that you can try implementing Kanban yourself but avoid some of the pitfalls.

And then you are even going to hear a segment of our discussion from AFTER we stopped the official recording.

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Kanban is a concept related to lean and just-in-time (JIT) production. The Japanese word kanban is a common everyday term meaning "signboard" or "billboard" and lacks the specialized meaning that this word has acquired in English. According to Taiichi Ohno, the man credited with developing JIT, kanban is a means through which JIT is achieved.

It was out of a need to maintain high level of improvements that the kanban system was devised by Toyota. Kanban became an effective tool to support the running of the production system as a whole. In addition, it proved to be an excellent way for promoting improvements because reducing the number of kanban in circulation highlighted problem areas.

In project management, Kanban can be described as a signaling system to trigger action. We welcome Eric Landes (http://aspadvice.com/blogs/elandes/default.aspx) and we get a wonderful introduction to Kanban. We discuss what Kanban is, what its benefits are, how it overlaps with project management, what you see when walking into a Kanban environment, if it works in an environment where no physical products are produced and we introduce you to a great number of resources.

And in our Gizmo's segment we present The Project Perfect Whitepaper Index. It contains about 100 white papers on project management topics. Sign up for the Project Perfect White Paper Mailing List and you will receive an email whenever a new paper is published. Highly recommended.