I run a 20-minute Monday pre-mortem with discipline leads tied to a 3-week lookahead in MS Project, and it’s been our best tool for rescuing slipping timelines and growing next-up PMs. Has anyone paired a simple decision log with a RAG board to coach ownership and speed, and found a tweak that helped you win your last RFP? We shaved 5 days on the Midtown library package using this setup.
One tweak that helped us win our last RFP: we added a ‘bid impact’ column to the decision log tied to the RAG board, and set a 24-hour SLA for any red item to get a named decision owner plus a one-line client-ready rationale we could paste into the proposal risk section. Small caveat: cap the log to 8–10 active items so it doesn’t slow the pre-mortem. Curious if you’ve tried tagging items with the MS Project task ID; we found slippage then auto-updates the board.
Building on @williams89, we added a ‘reversibility’ flag in the decision log (“two-way door” vs “one-way door”) and set a 4-hour fast path for two-way doors, with sponsor-on-call only for one-way, which cut 3 days on our last bid. Would you try a 15-minute “decision huddle” right after the pre-mortem to clear reds before they sprawl? Small caveat: keep the log fields lean or it turns into archaeology.
I pair the decision log + RAG with an “aging clock” and a per‑day cost field; anything that crosses 8 hours with cost >$2k/day auto‑reassigns to the sponsor, drops a 15‑min calendar hold, and pings a #bid‑desk thread — “decide once, broadcast twice” (a kitchen timer for decisions). It’s a bit pushy, but it shaved 3 days on our courthouse bid; @jasonfoster01, have you tried time‑based auto‑escalation instead of a flat SLA?
Quick win: a 2‑minute “assumption sweep” before your “20‑minute Monday” aligned the MS Project lookahead — keeps us fast. Worth trying?
Add a 7-minute handoff drill to your “20-minute Monday”: for each item in the 3-week MS Project lookahead, the next owner must state “ready by date, needs inputs.” Anything missing inputs gets a same-day calendar hold; it shaved a review cycle on our last bid, and the first week feels slower but the cadence snaps into place fast.