63 PROJECT MANAGEMENT TIPS-PART FOUR

Project Delivery – Monitoring and Reviewing Your Project
(Project Governance)

1. Have a clear project management monitoring and reviewing process – agreed by senior managers - the project sponsor and the project Board, if you have one.

2. Ensure your organisation’s corporate governance structure and your project management monitoring and control structure are compatible. If you do not know whether this is the case then seek senior management involvement.

3. Be aware early in the project what will be monitored, how they will be monitored and the frequency. Keep accurate records of your project not only for audit purposes but to ensure you have documents which enable you to monitor changes.

4. Use a Planned v. Actual form. It is easy to create – it allows you to monitor how you are progressing with specific tasks – time and money. Link these forms into milestone reviews.

5. Identify with your sponsor the type of control that is needed – loose or tight or a variation of these, e.g. tight at the start, loose in the middle, tight at the end. Ensure the system you develop reflects the type of control intended.

6. Agree a system for project changes – have an agreed system for monitoring and approving changes. Use change control forms and obtain formal sign off (agreement) by the sponsor, before action a change. Look for the impact of the change on the project scope as well as the “key driver” - quality, cost and time.

7. Appoint someone to be responsible for project quality especially in larger projects. Review quality formally with the client at agreed milestone dates.

8. Make certain you have agreed who can sanction changes in the absence of  your sponsor. If you haven’t agreed this, what will you do in their absence?

9. Set a time limit for project meetings to review progress. Have an agenda with times against each item and summarise after each item at the end of the meeting.

10. Produce action points against each item on the agenda and circulate within 24 hours of the meeting. Use these action points to help in the creation of your next agenda.

11.Review the items on the critical path checking they are on schedule. Review risks, review yours stakeholders and your communication plans and whether you are still on track to deliver on time, to budget and to the required quality standard.

12. Set a tolerance figure and monitor e.g. a tolerance figure of ±5% means as long as you are within the 5% limit you do not have to formally report. If exceed the 5% limit (cost or time) then you need to report this to the agreed person – probably your sponsor.

13. Report progress against an end of a stage – are you on schedule? Time, cost or quality? Ensure that if something is off schedule the person responsible for delivering it suggests ways to bring it back on time, within budget or to hit the right quality standard.

14. Develop an issues log to record items that may be causing concern. Review at your project meetings.

15. See whether you are still delivering the original project benefits when reviewing your project. If not, consider re-scoping or if appropriate abandoning the project. Do not be afraid of abandoning a project. Better to abandon now rather than waste valuable time, money, and resources working on something no longer required. If you close a project early – hold a project review meeting to identify learning.

16. Produce one-page reports highlighting key issues. Agree the areas to include with the Sponsor before writing a report.

17. Use a series of templates to support the monitoring process, e.g. milestone reporting, change control, log, planned v. actual.

18. Engender honest reporting against specific deliverables, milestones, or a critical path activity. If you do not have honest reporting imagine the consequences.