Monitoring an Active Project Plan
By Russ Finney
One of the biggest temptations for a project manager, especially if he or she is creating his or her own workplan, is to put a few extra hours in the plan (a little here, and a little there), just in case. The logic for this is: "if I underestimate the true duration or the required resources, I have built myself a cushion of time to fall back on. Since I am accountable for the budget, my behind is covered and I can sleep nights!" It is very rare to find a project manager who does not practice this "buffering" on a regular basis. Why? Because they are usually guessing in the first place! But is it really possible to work for an organization where plans don't have to be buffered? Absolutely! But in order for this to occur, the following conditions must exist:
- Estimates must be based on development metrics which have been collected for past projects.
- A consistent development methodology should be employed so that factual comparisons can be made.
- The culture of the organization must change to recognize the true time consumption required for each development task.
Changes to these time factors should only be as a result of true improvements in development techniques, the technology supporting these techniques, or the experience of the team itself.
The organization should reward the project managers for tightening up the estimation process rather than punishing them for being bad guessers.
Time Creates Enlightenment
A critical activity for all project managers is monitoring project progress. This is generally accomplished by capturing each team member's actual time utilization by task. The key point to consider in making the monitoring useful and accurate, is: the plan must be viewed as a living, changing document which reflects the current situation and the anticipated direction of the project at a moment in time.
In order to make this a reality, several attitudes must be adopted by both the team and the executive client sponsors:
- The project deadlines and staffing levels are the basis for team progress as long as the scope requirements and and project assumptions remain as defined.
- Actual time utilization should be reported for each task based on the way it actually occurred, not based on the way tasks were estimated.
- If new tasks are required to be performed which were not a part of the original workplan, they should be added to the updated workplan and subsequent time should be tracked for them also.
Reporting Status
At some point in the project, usually on a regular basis, someone is going to want to know how things are going. Unfortunately, this is just reality of system building. In most cases over the years, this has been accomplished through the use of the ever present, universally acknowledged, status report. Depending on the size of the project, this report may actually be presented at a status meeting. Over the years, the eternal quest of the project manager has been to find the answers to the following status related questions:
- Who is really interested in the status of the project?
- How do you keep the status meeting from turning into a yawning contest?
- What information should actually be presented within the report itself?
One thing is certain, if a status meeting approach will be utilized, keep the meeting short, and always end the meeting at the appointed hour. It seems that there is nothing that project managers enjoy more than sitting around for hours on end, discussing the status of their current project, while at the same time to designing the system's perceived inner workings on the back of an envelope. This is not the purpose of status reporting. The report itself should contain several key items, and the meeting should briefly cover these items and clarify any unusual circumstances or issues.
Copyright © 1999, Russ Finney, All Rights Reserved