Lines of Balance - Part 2 of 2

In this second part of the podcast about Lines of Balance, Ricardo talks more about how this concept can be used in the project's planning and control phases. This time, Ricardo gives an example about the application of lines of balance in an election vote counting process. Do not forget to listen to the first part of this podcast.

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Episode transcript

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Speaker 1 (4s): Hello everybody welcome to the five Minutes PM podcast today. I like to continue the concept of line of Balance last week, I use it in engineering, a very symbol, but an engineering example about building houses and painting houses and where I could demonstrate the concept of the line of Balance line of Balance is very much applied when you have repetitive work, when something is repetitious through the project.

And also when you have a link between two tasks. So last week I use it carpenters building wooden houses and painters paint in this house's, the painters were faster than the carpenters. Then you had a problem because the painters, we started to become idle with time. Now, I want to use a different example. Let's suppose you have an election and your project is to count the votes, to decide who is the new governor at the new president or the new mayor, an electoral polls that you have only a hundred ballot boxes, and you have to teams in two tasks.

One team is to countable. The second thing is just to review the counting. The 10 that is counting the votes. They can count 10 ballot boxes per day. Why they can count 10 because they need to open the paper. They need to organize the paper and then count the reviewers. When they get the material, they get everything prepared. So it's much faster and easier so they can review 20 ballot boxes per day.

So of course, if they start at the same day around 12 noon there with North to do, because they already review the first ballot, let's suppose that you can do something like very fast process of transferring the counting to the reveals. So what that line of Balance will give to you on the line of Balance. If you plot this two lines, so take a paper and draw on the ax.

Okay. Date and Mark from one to 10 on the why you put Balance from one to a hundred. Okay. Then of course the counting is very simple. Is starting on the zero. You just put every day with 10. So you would draw a line from a first day, ten second day, 23rd, day 30 up to the 10th day, where are you will reach a hundred. The reveal has to Weiss the inclination of the first one that counting.

So the best point is to start on day five, because if you, you can start reviewing on day five, this five days from five to 10, they will review her a hundred and you will not have anybody idle with no work to be done. So this is the concept. So every time you have two lines, you need to understand if they are related, they cannot cross each other. Because if they cross mints, this assessor will become idle because they need to wait.

For example, the reviewer's will become with no work. Why? Because cause people are still counting. So you have this Balance so you need to C in the best option, if you are thinking that on the fast pace work each day, you have two lines in parallel. There is very close to each other because they do not cross, but the very, very close, the best way of doing this on this case is a starting on day five or maybe 5.5.

Okay. Just to have the gap to transfer. The second option of course is to increase the number of people counting. So instead of counting 10, you are counting 15 or 20, then you will speed up the process because the critical problem is to count not to reveal, or maybe you can release people from the review group and is low them down so they can work for that the 10 days. So this is very, very important for you to calculate how the labor is a sign up to the work.

And if we do this requires a payment, it's very important because the way you built this Balance Lines will increase or reduce your expenditures. And this is a great tool for you. When you have this repetitious work, it's a great tool because then you can optimize. And it's all about optimization. When we talk about good project management, apply it to the project, so how we can optimize the results. So this is something very simple, and it's something that you have in your Swiss knife for your next project or for your current project.

I hope you enjoy this podcast until the next week with another five minutes BM Podcast.

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Lines of Balance - Part 2 of 2

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