The Gate

How many stage reviews have you walked into where the date was fixed a year ago and the status turned up that morning? The date is the easy part of a gate. It never moves.

Twenty people are in the room, several of them dialled in from two floors up. The pack opens on eleven workstreams and by the fourth one the colour has stopped being green. Nobody is surprised by their own line. They are surprised by everyone else’s. A meeting booked to approve a stage spends its hour discovering where the stage actually is.

Nobody withheld anything. A project manager reports a status, because reporting is what the role was built to do, and the resource that would change that status sits in another function, on another manager’s plan. Escalating means telling somebody else’s boss that their week is wrong. So the status stays inside the workstream until a date forces it out, and the date is the gate.

The cost is never booked as a red gate. It arrives later as a slipped date, then as overtime, then as freight bought at short notice. At a plant I ran, a red gate cost two to three weeks every time, and the same three workstreams produced it repeatedly. Nothing was wrong with the review. It was simply the only place the truth was scheduled.

So there is one question worth putting to a programme before its next review: what would have to be true for this gate to contain no new information? Nobody should be learning the state of a programme from its gate. By the time it is said aloud, the date has already moved.

Where this shows up: New line & industrialisation — getting a programme to land in an operation that can hold it.