Weekly Progress Tracking Meetings: Your Project’s Life Blood!

Creating and maintaining momentum on your projects is a tough battle; especially when your team members have other responsibilities including other projects to work on. How do you keep your project lively and moving forward? Well-organized and run Project Progress Tracking Meetings are the key!

Notice I didn’t just say project progress tracking meetings? I said ‘well-organized and run..’. What’s the difference? Lack of planning or poor planning will have the exact opposite effect. Lack of planning will drain the life out of your project and allow the focus of your key team members to shift away. Once they’re lost, it’s very hard to get them back. 

For project managers who hate planning, they experience the same effects project after project; no one shows, and when they do they are not prepared to provide updates, or they take notes and tell you that they will get back to you. This leaves the PM with a meeting that produced no real value and wasted everyone’s time including theirs. 

Eventually your number of attendees dwindles each week until you find yourself cancelling these meetings. 

Your project is flat-lining. It’s easy to blame the guy that didn’t provide the info or support the PM needed. But ultimately it isn’t their job to make this project a success…it’s the PM’s job.

A well run progress tracking meeting produces the follow for its participants:

• ·   Team members arrive fully aware of what is expected of them, and what updates specifically they are expected to provide.
• ·    Team members have an open floor to demonstrate their prowess (incentive to attend)
• ·    They have an open forum to raise an issue and ask for support from others in the room
• ·   They leave the meeting knowing exactly what is expected of them for the next meeting, giving them ample time to plan their work load and execute for next week.
• ·   They arrive NEXT week with the answers to the questions or issues that were raised LAST week
• ·    A habit of performance excellence develops and encourages other team members to do the same.
• ·   The PMs establishes a sense of leadership and confidence that there is someone looking further down the road for obstacles than the current deliverables everyone else is focused on. The team can more confidently focus on their more immediate work knowing that the PM is looking ahead and HAS A PLAN
• ·    The PM’s leave the room with the information that they intended to get from the meeting
• ·    The PM gets floor time to provide clear expectations to the team
•     The PM gets more and more people to attend without having to chase them down. If a person gets to shine in your meeting, they are more likely to show then if they are constantly being made to appear incompetent. 

The energy that everyone leaves the room with carries over into the focus and quality of the work your team needs to produce. Planning gives people time to think about the best way to perform a task instead of the tired approach of just giving you what they can in the time they’ve got left. It may feel like you won, but the shoddy end result will really be a loss for you and the team. No one wants to work on a project that is clearly going to fail.

This result means that the PM needs to invest the time to prepare for the meeting. It can mean spending 3 hours preparing the details so that your 1 hour meeting continues to breathe life into your project. Remember you don’t always see the work that everyone does when they leave the room. A well planned & executed meeting may require 4 hours of your time each week BUT it produces the momentum to get dozens or even hundreds of hours of work done this week for you!

It is the best and most immediate investment you can make to your own project success and towards building your professional brand. The good news is that it's never too late to start. You can start next week!

Also, this meeting can’t be monthly, or as needed. You and your team both need a regular energy boost. Just like needing to eat regularly to be able to function, this recurring, well-planned and executed meeting provides sustenance to your whole team on a regular basis. If you want to encourage a habit of excellence, you need to start with you. Once a week will give you and your team the momentum you need and allow you to provide your team with manageable, bite-sized chunks of work to do weekly. If you dump it all on them at once (too busy to plan & prepare) your project will stagnate, and you will find that you’re working inhuman hours to try to compensate.

If you’d rather DO than PLAN, you may need to consider whether project management is where your strengths lay. Planning and running progress tracking meetings isn’t a nice to have – it is the most vital regular interaction you will have with your team. Leaders must plan in order to lead. Doer’s follow plans and focus on doing. Trying to do both is not leadership.

The old adage: ‘if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got’ is the truth not just in project management, its true in life. If you are looking for a way to make a clear difference in your career, and set yourself up for the big promotion, don’t be afraid to lead.

Weekly progress tracking meetings is a PM’s opportunity to grow beyond the boundaries of their past performance and stand out amongst their peers, with their team and impress their executive stakeholders.

I'd love to hear your opinions and feedback. Have a different point of view? Please share it!! And thank you for reading my blog!

This process is a powerful tool to add to your PM tool kit for improving your brand and your reputation for execution excellence in project management.

For more information on tools & techniques that you can use to improve your project performance in increase the value of your brand join us on Twitter @exOrionLLC.

by Sean Best, PMP. Owner of exOrion LLC. His 20+ years of project management experience includes work in the banking, payment processing, telecommunications and software development industries. He can be reached at sbest@exorion.net

Work Back Schedules: Friend or Foe?

I've had a like / hate thing with work back schedules over the years. It’s the eternal battle between building your plan quickly or building it with precision. The answer to this battle is somewhere in between the two.

A work back schedule is a very high level timeline that you draft out on a white board starting with the last deliverable of the project, and marking down the broad stroke milestones going backwards to the beginning. Then you use your understanding of roughly how long each of those deliverables usually take and plot in the dates, starting with the go live / launch milestone, with the date that was already promised to the client and written in pencil on the back of a cocktail napkin by your sales rep!

By the time you get to the beginning of the timeline, (the last item you mark on the board) you’ll see whether you have plenty of run way, or whether you're launching B-25B Mitchell U.S. Army Air Force bombers from the deck of a U.S. Navy Aircraft carrier (See the Doolittle Raid on Japan for the reference ;)! 

What you end up with is a very basic but good educated guess on how much time you’ll need to execute your project.

The broad stroke deliverables (if you manage IT projects for example) working backwards from the go live date, could be:

·                  Deployment (Change board approval & code deployment) – 5 days

·                  User Acceptance Testing (user experience) – 4 weeks

·                  Quality Assurance Testing (testing that functionality works and doesn’t break production) – 4 weeks

·                  Development (writing code / configuration) – 4 weeks

·                  Functional Requirements Documentation (documenting HOW the code needs to work / functions that it will need to perform) – 4 weeks

·                  Business Requirements Documentation (documenting WHAT the functionality needs to do) – 4 weeks

·                  Use Cases (documenting process flows of what the functionality needs to do to satisfy the business goals.) – 2 weeks

·                  Submit business case to the project review & prioritization committee – 1 week.

This means that your guesstimate total duration for this project is about 6 months from start to finish.

If the napkin said that the target go live date was January 1st 2014, you would have needed to start your project July 1st 2013. If today is Oct 13th 2013, your gap (the difference between your preferred or target go live date, and what it would actually be if you started today) is about 3 ½ months. Your go live date is likely closer to April 15th 2014.

Now this is NOT an exact science, BUT it does give you a good idea on the do-ability of this project in the time you've got to work with.

Now you can make choices about how to satisfy this business need. Do you scale back the scope of the project to recover 3 ½ months? Do you break the project into smaller phases so that you can deliver SOMETHING by Jan 1st?  Do you add more resources to speed up delivery? Do you negotiate moving the target date out? You have options, which at this early stage of the project are much easier to discuss and gain support for than you would if you waited until you developed the detailed project plan and are well into the project. 

If you wait, it will be too late to have these conversations without a lot of push back. This is where you build your brand and add value as a project manager.

The risks of using this approach incorrectly include making the mistake of using this work back schedule as your execution plan. You will need to re-assess your plan based on information that you find out once the functional requirements are done and your developers have had a chance to provide their Level of Effort (LOE). You will need to build out the details of your plan with more precise information and re-calibrate it once you have this LOE.

As a result you should not commit to a delivery based on the work back schedule. It is a thumb-in-the-air guesstimate, not a precise forecast. It gives the key parties a good idea of the general scope of the project, not an exact prediction.

The value add you bring to the table includes the ability to gauge the scope and duration of a project quickly and early on, so that your business leads and sales team can manage the message as early on as possible. 

You can use your work back plan as your barometer to determine how realistic the target date is (or not). And most importantly, you have milestones to drive your team towards for the first few deliverables - project committee approval of scope, development of use cases, business requirements and functional requirements. Because these deliverables can be subjective and involve departments that do not normally work within the confines of a timeline, they need to have target dates to have their work complete IF the target date is going to be a realistic date for your ‘go live’.  

It also allows them to prioritize their work. No target dates for these early deliverables equates to an absence of urgency for your team (i.e., low priority). Your project sits in limbo while you WAIT for direction. Even without all of the details you can still drive your project forward. DO NOT WAIT!

The benefit to you as the project manager is that it gets your team working NOW, while it buys you time to build out your more detailed project plan. No one is waiting on you (and pressuring you) to get a plan put out there yet. 

Take advantage of this time to press your team forward while you build more precision into your plan. The analogy that I use is that you know that you need to go west from the start. You may not know if your final destination is Los Angeles, San Francisco or Las Vegas. Your work back schedule is like a compass. Your detailed project plan is more like a GPS. In both cases you are marching west. The detailed plan will give you specific routes but you still have to go west. You may need to alter your course a bit but you have already started marching. 

The alternative is to wait until you have every route, detour, alternate route, gas stop, hotel, restaurant, Wal-Mart, Pep Boys, etc. mapped and planned out before you leave your house. Time wasted that you cannot recover. Your 6 months extends to 10 months or more while you put everyone on hold until you’ve got your masterpiece plan. However your business will have lost ground and position in the market place. You are either driving the bus or trying to catch it. 

You can’t lead from behind. Get in front of it early and provide your team direction while you figure out the details to build your ‘Mona Lisa’.

This process is a powerful tool to add to your PM tool kit for improving your brand and your reputation for execution excellence in project management. For more information on tools & techniques that you can use to improve your project performance in increase the value of your brand join us on Twitter @exOrionLLC.

by Sean Best, PMP. Owner of exOrion LLC. His 20+ years of project management experience includes work in the banking, payment processing, telecommunication and software development industries. He can be reached at sbest@exorion.net

Business: Achieving the Three Pillars of Project Management - By Yvonne Nhuta

This is an excerpt of an article on one of the fundamental aspects of managing projects. 

"Tracking the Project:

Generally speaking, project managers will normally find themselves limited by time and money. This leaves the biggest task: making sure that the quality delivered is worthy of the time and money spent on the project. If a project has been planned properly, the project manager will be able to identify when a project might breach its parameters and be able to proactively respond to keep it on track. An effective project plan will consider all the possible ways in which cost and time can be reduced without compromising on the quality of the overall delivery. If all projects are conducted in this manner, a business is sure to increase its bottom-line. "

Limitations of time often means that the planning isn't as robust as a project manager would want it to be. Hence the poor quality end result. Planning requires time, patience, careful analysis of the project data and the ability to isolate problem areas BEFORE they actually become problems then devise an action plan to handle them if they do occur. How do YOU handle the problem of  time limits and managing your projects? I'd be happy to hear from you!!

To read this entire blog go to: Achieving the Three Pillar of Project Management

When is a Project Manager not a Project Manager

By Anthony Sherick

"It seems that these days everyone claims to be a project manager. Glancing through the jobs pages of newspapers, you’ll see a wide variety of companies crying out for the skills of experienced project managers. Account managers are being renamed project managers; In fact anyone who can be classed as managing a project is now called a PM. But are these ‘true’ project management roles? We take a look at some of the project management jobs that don’t require the skills of a true project manager."

By Anthony Sherick of Project Manager Jobs (www.projectmanagerjobs.co.uk) the dedicated website for jobs in project management.

 (See the rest of this article at http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/when-is-a-project-manager-not-a-project-manager.html )

Good article and very true. This also raises a series of questions, particularly as it relates to the “Subject Matter Expert PM” in this article.

• ·         What project tools do they go to and rely on to position their projects for success?
• ·         Which project management artifacts do they create? Do they know which ones to create; when to use them and why?
• ·         Where do they go to for guidance and administrative support?

We would love to hear your thoughts, stories and comments. Use the Comments Box on the left side of this blog page.

Operational Readiness Review - Getting your Team to March to the Same Orders Willingly While Building Your Brand!

The concept of an Operational Readiness Review originates from a process that is used by the United States Military and NASA  It is used to ensure that all team members are crystal clear on the details of the mission they are preparing to complete. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_review_(U.S._government). 

Everything from equipment being used, to who will be using them, for what, when and in what sequence of events.

This process is one that can be leveraged conceptually for complex project execution like migrations / conversions for example.

Managing projects are complex work requiring focus and concentration. Migration / conversion / on-boarding projects are a good example of complex projects. They often have direct impacts on your customers if they aren’t carefully analyzed, planned, socialized, refined & executed.

You may have to run several of them, and produce increasingly more predictable results with each pass.

o  Operations requires this – manage through change effectively while maintaining performance within existing SLA’s.

o   Sales needs this – sell a solution to a client and setting realistic expectations on end product, delivery timing and quality.

o   Customer Service needs this – manage customer expectations and addressing customer needs.

o   Finance needs this in order to be better positioned to quantify and predict ROI

Why do I need an ORR? An ORR or Operational Readiness Review is a process by which the individual steps of a migration / conversion are reviewed with the core team members and then documented. It produces a document that details the process; step by step and in the proper sequence. There may need to be several iterations of the review process and document updates. Not only for the purpose of getting it right, but also to allow the process details to be fully socialized with the core team members who will be executing those individual steps. Nike Project management (Just Do It) cannot be relied upon for these types of projects. Too many things need to be planned, anticipated and have back up plans in the event that something goes wrong. This is highly likely in these sorts of projects. 

Flow chart out individual execution steps (grouped by resource). The steps are often times sequential, though many may happen concurrently. There are many steps and participants who need to be working in synchronicity and on time for a migration / conversion to be successful. While a document of the steps is critical and necessary, many people are visual learners and as a project manager, you need to ensure that you are communicating with all of your core team members in a language that they understand.

Create document with detailed steps, owners, dates, times, and comments. A flow chart does not provide the level of detail that a checklist will provide. Some will need this level of detail while others will need less. Most often the involved stakeholders will need the checklist. The informed stakeholders (customer service, marketing, etc) will not always require the same level of detail but will want to understand the process. The flow chart is a great tool for identifying the key checkpoints, exit/entry criteria from one phase of the migration to the next, and particularly the Go / No Go;  Point of No Return in the process.  Of course if there is a No Go decision, your plan must include a roll back strategy otherwise Go / No Go becomes Go-No-Matter-What. It is important that all understand when this milestone is reached and that all stakeholders are involved in this part of the process. They need to assess and participate in the decision making process as it will affect their realms of responsibility.

Review both with your execution team and stakeholders. Ensure that all understand the process, and understand the impacts of the migration to their individual departments and responsibilities.

Run multiple phases, tweak and modify the process after each phase. Where possible, break a migration into multiple phases. Running test phases is akin to warm ups for the big game. It will allow you to test the process, correct or modify and then try again. Having a high sense of comfort in the validity of your process is important not just for you but to instill confidence in your stakeholders who you will need to support you during the migration, and who will inherit the outcome.

An Operational Readiness Review accomplishes many things at once. It ensures that all team members are on the same page / marching to the same orders; Increases confidence that all team members know their roles and are well prepared to execute them correctly; creates a more cohesive team performance and environment; Increases chances for success / better prepared for handling exceptions; manages expectations with informed stakeholders.

This process is a powerful tool to add to your PM tool kit for improving your brand in project management by increasing your reputation for execution excellence.

For more information on tools & techniques that you can use to improve your project performance in increase the value of your brand visit us at www.exorion.net . Join us on Twitter @exOrionLLC.

by Sean Best, PMP. Owner of exOrion LLC. His 20+ years of project management experience includes work in the banking, payment processing, telecommunication and software development industries. He can be reached at sbest@exorion.net  

Follow us on twitter at @exOrionLLC

Links and info for project professionals and all who manage projects.

Project administration - better than root canal surgery by Kirin Bondale

Regardless of the PM methodology used for a given project, project administration exists. On the low end it may be as minimal as reporting which specific work items have been completed and effort remaining on incomplete work items. On the high end it may include time entry, issue, action, task and risk status updating.

Convincing project team members that these activities are a necessary part of their work on your project is a challenge, especially when you have no formal authority over these resources. As project managers, what can we do to alleviate this pain? One approach could be for the project manager to shoulder this burden on behalf of the team, but that is hardly a good solution. The PM will end up with little time to manage all but the smallest projects.

http://www.projecttimes.com/kiron-bondale/project-administration-sure-beats-root-canal-surgery.html

Overloaded project manager? 8 simple tips by Lisa Anderson

Do you sit in project meetings?  How about develop project plans?  Report out to executives or board members?  Track results?  I’d bet if I tracked the time of 10 managers on any day of the week, at least 8 of the 10 would have some sort of involvement in a project for at least part of the day.  For most of my clients, it would be 9 out of 10.  So, as an overloaded manager, why not think about a few tips to stand out from the crowd? 

http://www.projecttimes.com/lisa-anderson/overloaded-project-manager-here-are-8-simple-tips-to-help.html

How to manage the state of your Project

Excerpt on 'How to Manage the State of your Project' by Craig McQueen.

"Applying a scientific method permits an organization to acquire new knowledge and integrate and correct previous knowledge. In this way an organization can improve with how they deliver projects. It enables an organization to make fact-based decisions rather than relying on opinions."

http://www.projecttimes.com/articles/how-to-measure-the-state-of-your-project.html

Status Reporting, Clarity and Accountability' by George Pitagorsky

Excerpt from article titled 'Status Reporting, Clarity and Accountability' by George Pitagorsky. About the importance of status (performance) reporting to the success of your project.

"The content of a status report should be presented in levels of detail, mapped to the projects work breakdown structure, deliverables or activity list.  The report addresses scope, time and cost.  These three represent the traditional Performance Measurement Baseline.  Scope, time and cost are objective and quantifiable.  Their current state can be compared with a baseline.  The project plan is the baseline.  Regardless of the level of detail, report content must reflect the plan. "

Go to http://www.projecttimes.com/george-pitagorsky/status-reporting-clarity-and-accountability.html

Universal Challenges for Project Professionals

There are many challenges experienced while managing projects that transcend business units, companies and even industries. They are common and sources of risk that until now are simply accepted along with lower quality project results. The industry, project scope, technology etc. change but the issues for project professionals and for those who manage projects, are consistently the same issues. 

Challenge: ‘Although I have a recurring scheduled meeting weekly, to go over the progress of my projects, booked into my teams’ calendars, the people I need to have in my meetings to move it forward don’t attend and when they do they aren’t prepared with the answers I need.’

Challenge: ‘Although I spend time pouring through the details of my project daily, I never seem to feel like I’m controlling my project. Instead, it feels like my projects are controlling me. I’m always playing catch up.’

Challenge: ‘I always feel like I have too many projects to manage and I have to cut corners on the amount of time I spend on the project plan maintenance just to stay on top of things that are in progress.’

Challenge: ‘I spend way too much time preparing and providing status updates on my projects. I just don’t have time to produce all of these status reports and effectively manage my projects.’

Challenge: ‘as a project professional, I know that I am only as good as my last project. I also know that it’s vital that I build and establish my brand. I can’t do it in such a busy environment, as I am forced to cut corners to get my job done. How do I increase the value of my brand without having to give up my workload (especially projects I really want to work on) to do it?’

A large chunk of a project professional’s day is buried in administrative work that requires a great deal of time, concentration, plan & progress analysis to determine the impacts of a project’s current progress. This then needs to be clearly communicated to the team in order for the plan to be executed effectively.

There are a lot of moving parts of a project that can help or hurt your project. If your analysis is done badly or not at all, many of the challenges above become the norm. If done well, the number of projects that can be managed by the same project professional reduces dramatically. There seems to be no solution to this, so sub-par quality is simply accepted. More project professionals are hired to compensate for this shortage.

At least 75% of a project professional’s job is focused on clear, concise and timely COMMUNICATION! The successes of your projects rely on your ability to communicate the right information to the right people at the right time. While this sounds simple, determining the right info, people & time is a challenge that requires solid preparation and plan analysis. 

While there are dozens of project planning & execution software solutions available there are no software solutions that support the project professional with the heavy administrative element of their jobs.

The administrative element of a project professional’s job directly impacts: the number of concurrent projects they can manage, the efficiency with which they manage their projects; the efficiency with which their team executes and the level and effectiveness of the involvement of the project sponsors and executives. Ultimately this leads to an increase in the amount of control you as a project professional and your sponsors and executives have over the projects.

No matter how well-crafted your plan is, if you aren't communicating the right info to the right people at the right time to produce the right results your project will struggle.

Most organizations either do not understand or see the value in hiring a project administrator. In many cases the kind of analysis that the PM needs done, needs to be done by the PM in order for the PM to gain a greater insight into the deliverables of their projects and the dynamics of their team.

If any of these challenges ring a bell or if there are challenges you've experienced I haven't mentioned here please reply by commenting on this blog. And thanks!!

 by Sean Best, PMP. Owner of exOrion LLC. His 20+ years of project management experience includes work in the banking, payment processing, telecommunication and software development industries. He can be reached at exorion.solutions@gmail.com

The thin line between SME & PM

It isn’t uncommon for subject matter experts to run or lead projects. In fact this tends to occur as the focus of projects from a sponsor’s perspective is generally on the ‘content’ of the project and they often don’t really see the value of a separate PM role on the project.

While it is vital to have a subject matter expert or analyst on a project, (as PM’s should not be responsible for solutioning) there are some subtle yet potentially costly risks associated with putting that individual in a dual SME/PM role.

It is human nature to focus our attention and efforts in our areas of expertise and more often than not this is what occurs. A SME is more likely to focus their attention on the details around the ‘solution’ and to then go through the motions when it comes to the PM component of their roles.  This includes throwing together a ‘project plan’ because this is expected of the PM side of their role.

My experience has shown many SME built project plans and there are some consistent findings in this respect. One is that the project plan always seems to end on the targeted project completion date, but the critical path cannot be calculated.

This is usually because there are few if any dependencies built in. Instead the Start No Earlier Than (I call it the SNET) constraint is abused throughout the plan obscuring the total slack.

So what? Well while the solution may approximate perfection, the estimated time, effort and costs are unknown and likely based on a faulty ‘work back’ plan. The ‘project plan’ is simply window dressing and there simply to satisfy the sponsor & stakeholders’ need to see things appear to wrap up on time.

What results is often a project that overruns it’s scheduled time due to poor planning, key resources that may also cost dollars (IT resources or consultants) either disperse to other previously committed projects or must charge the extra time against the project increasing the budget and lowering the return on investment.

In many cases this part of the job is severely neglected in favor of solutioning. The other risk is that having the SME who is also responsible for the PM function is akin to having the fox watching the chicken coup.  The PM role naturally provides the devil’s advocate to question the validity and assess the overall impact to the project’s success when change requests are introduced.

Scope creep cannot be properly managed without having an unbiased second opinion and a true assessment of the impact on the overall plan. This again leads to the perfect solution that will likely meet none of the requirements of the triple constraint. If getting to market on time is a key requirement, you need to have someone whose focus will remain on getting to market on time. SME’s are excellent at what they do which is why they perform this role. Their participation is vital to the project’s success. Excellence and perfection are the undying goals of a SME and rightly so. This is why they are at the table.

A PM’s role is to ensure that ALL of the objectives of the sponsor are being addressed, stakeholder expectations are managed, and that there is a high quality, regularly revisited plan in place along with the proper checkpoints and processes to address the unknown unknowns that tend to crop up at inopportune times.

Not all projects require a PM. As a rule of thumb, if the number of stakeholders and team members is small, the scope of the project is limited to one department (not an enterprise wide project) and time & cost is not an issue you may be able to manage with a SME/PM. Once the scope of the project grows beyond this, your risks increase significantly unless you have a qualified & experienced project manager running your project.

The PM’s view of the project is much broader than the SME and project success means keeping your eye on all of the moving parts of the project, including the solution.

Article published in BA Times Dec 2007 by Sean Best, PMP, Project Management Professional and Owner of exOrion LLC. His 20+ years of project management experience includes work in the banking, payment processing, telecommunications and software industries. He can be reached at exorion.solutions@gmail.com

Decision Making – Trusting Your Data

Making decisions is an inherent part of managing projects.  How those decisions are made, and the information that they are based upon, can make the difference between a successfully run project and a potential disaster.

Projects are comprised of hundreds, and potentially thousands of issues.  Where do you focus your attention for the greatest gain?

Your information or ‘data’ is only as good as the effort you put into keeping it current.  However, what you learn from your data can be the difference between managing by the skin of your teeth or managing your projects as a professional PM, making decisions based on facts.  It is the difference between following every goose-chase looking for the ones that might put your project at risk and identifying the real risks quickly and early.

In order for information to become project data it must be documented.

Project data is any documented information related to your project;  e.g., project plans, business cases, PMO documents, emails, logs decks, minutes, agendas, status updates, etc.

Project data is not hallway conversations, meeting discussions, gossip, innuendo, hearsay, body language, tone of voice.  Verbal information remains just that until the commitment to document it is made.  It is more difficult to deny something that was written or recorded than to deny something that was said.

The value of the data is directly related to the level of commitment behind it.  When project information is documented it is published for public scrutiny and does not rely on the accuracy of individuals’ memories.

The pareto rule is that 80% of the problems are the result of 20% of the issues.  To find that 20% you need to gather, organized, validate and analyze your project data.  Mine the 20% that will give you the biggest bang for your buck and delegate the rest.

This could be interpreted as ‘passing the buck’, but at the end of the day your job is to manage the project, not to personally solve every single issue that arises.  The 20% usually has a component whose consequences would directly affect the scope, schedule, cost or quality of the end product and by this definition falls under the jurisdiction of the PM to address.  The remaining will generally fall within the realm of responsibility of the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) requiring a greater depth of knowledge / experience than a PM would typically possess.

After all, every project has a team.  Each team member is responsible and accountable for their deliverables and it’s the PM’s job to leverage their skills, talents and strengths by assigning them the issues to manage that are best suited to resolve.

For example, a working project plan with an unusually high number of tasks that are locked with “Start No Earlier Than” or “Start No Later Than” constraints will hide the true critical path, particularly if these tasks have predecessors and successors.

Article published in Project Times September 2007 by Sean Best, PMP, Project Management Professional and Owner of exOrion LLC. His 20+ years of project management experience includes work in the banking, payment processing, telecommunications and software industries. He can be reached at exorion.solutions@gmail.com