How to monitor your project successfully?

The project has defined requirements and a plan. The next step is to confirm how the project will deliver the right quality of work and manage risks (unexpected issues), which may impact your project timing, quality, or budget. 

A well known saying for Project Managers is that “projects have time, quality and budget - you can control any two.

This is because as timing slips or quality (or scope) increases, costs go up. As mentioned in the Budget blog, it is part of the project with the most pressure and the least amount of monitoring and control.

Therefore, controlling the risks and quality becomes part of the monitoring and control of the budget overall. 

How to control Project Risks?

How to control Project Risks is a complex issue. Some risks may be obvious and known in advance. These include staff and materials availability. They can generally be estimated but are generally controllable on a project. 

However, other risks may be unknown but also unknowable. Sometimes referred to as black swans, the unknown unknowns create large project risks but are generally unlikely. These include pandemics, work strikes, out of business, and similar events.

Risks that are likely and high impact should be tracked with mitigation planning where possible as risks occur. This planning will all the Project Manager, and Project Owner address the issue and execute the migration actions.

All Risks may happen and may impact the project. However, the likelihood of the event and the impact magnitude differ per risk.

Often presented in a matrix of how likely and order of impact, risks can also be documented as:

• Risk category — what is the issue, what will it impact first? Labor, materials, budget, or something else?

• Risk likelihood — what percentage is estimated of the risk occurring during the project?

• Impact likelihood — what percentage impact or change will the risk have on the project?

As an example, staff unavailability is likely during the life of a project due to illness, vacation, or allocation elsewhere. However, as long as timelines account for some of these variances, or more than one person has the skills needed, the impact will remain low. In our example below, we estimated that this is 10% likely to happen outside the planned estimations in the project but will have a 70% impact on the project. This assumes, worst case, that the skill is missing for a considerable amount of time, and there is no replacement. 

Should this staffing gap scenario happen, the project may lose time, quality, or delay milestones, including product go live or launch. This is why the impact percentage is high. 

However, this worst-case scenario should not actually have this impact with good planning and oversight by the Project Manager and Project Office. If staff planning is in place, even unplanned absences should be mitigated by using other options in staff or task planning.  

How to control Project Quality?

Project Quality is another key component of the overall project. Why? If the right solution to the right user at the right time is the end product. Then it is also the purpose of the project. A well-monitored plan and budget are not considered successful project management if the product did not meet the stakeholder's agreed outcome from the Project Charter.

Therefore, a document that sets out the requirements clearly and completely is critical. This is why I prefer user experience documentation. Done well, this document will tell you how the process, role, content, and user experience (feeling + output) is realized. This detailed level is generally required since building a final product is the most detailed of all actions.

Consider the example of building a house (you may have done this or seen examples on TV). The amount of detail in the processes, materials, and final results can make the difference between a nice warm house that came in on budget and time or a house that does not meet inspections or the owner's expectations.

Ideally, the user experiences can be made into poster size documents that can put in the work area so that the project team can easily see the details. The use case process, roles, content, and experience may be added to and amended as more questions require users to define more details as the build process occurs. This is likely to happen, especially with an Agile approach. However, increases in scope (otherwise known as scope creep) must be monitored and controlled to limit overruns in time and budget to the project.

How to Control Project Changes?

Once Project Scope is confirmed, it is important to use a Change Control Log to track new requests from Users or required by technical requirements identified after the Project has started the Build Phase. This keeps changes transparent and the impact to the Project trackable. Requested Changes should follow a documented process with a team to review and assess the impact of changes. The Project Manager and/or Sponsor should review the summary of changes to confirm the agreed impact to the project. Changes that are not approved need to be communicated to users and the project team.

How Project Management Monitors and Controls? 

Monitoring and Controlling projects is a continuous process for the project manager. Key to these ideas are the regular meeting and review of the project's progress with the team and the stakeholders. These meetings are generally done separately. However, or major issues, it can be helpful to have the team leads available for discussions with the stakeholders. 

Also, the team needs to be accountable to the project manager for assessing possible slips in risk, quality, and other monitored issues to make sure the Project management systems and roles are notified as soon as there is an issue and that the mitigation actions are put in place and tracked to make sure they achieve the intended resolution. 

What’s next in your project journey?

Would you get a free downloadable with usable templates and examples along with detailed instructions? Then go to the Project Manager’s Toolkit.

Good monitoring is good management. 

What do you think is key to good Project Management? Please comment in the box below.