The Manufacturing Project Manager

The line has to move in ninety days.

The capital is not approved, half the people you need do not report to you, and the customer cannot take a single missed shipment.

That is a manufacturing project. It has a schedule with a loading dock at one end and a customer at the other, capital that has to be justified before anyone will fund it, and a plant that has to keep shipping while you rebuild it.

Nobody hands you a method for that. This book is the method.

Four gates, one spine

Every program in this book moves through the same four decisions. Should we even do this? Is the plan real and funded? Is the work under control? What did we actually deliver?

Learn that spine once and it carries a line transfer, a product launch, a plant move, or a capital install.

What you will be able to do

• Build a business case leadership will actually fund, with payback that survives the room
• Plan in elapsed time instead of effort hours, with a real critical path and a frozen baseline
• Cost the project in three scenarios instead of one optimistic number
• Run a gate review that ends in a recorded decision, not another meeting
• Lead a dozen people who do not report to you
• Protect the customer through cutover, then close out so cleanly they hand you the next program

Three complete programs run start to finish with the real numbers, so you see the decisions and not just the theory. A toolkit appendix gives you the charter, risk register, status page, and closeout scorecard, ready to use on Monday.

Written by a PMP-certified program manager and industrial engineer who has moved the lines, defended the capital request, and stood in front of the customer when the schedule slipped.

If you run projects inside a plant, this is your field manual.