Home | Login | Recent Changes | Search | All Pages | Help

SessId003

It's 10am: Do you know where your project is?
EstherDerby, JohannaRothman

Project managers are always looking to improve their view of the project status. We use individual status reports, one-on-one meetings, project team meetings, the WBS and MBWA to see what's happening. Some of us have different results with these mechanisms. In this session, Esther and Johanna will examine with you some of our key questions and how we get answers on a project. We'll examine these questions, and discuss how you detect the answers to them:

1. What do you want to know as a project manager about the state of your project?
   
   
2. What do you think you know? How did you come to that belief?
   
   
3. What are people working on?
   
   
4. What does complete mean?
   
   
5. What are the milestones? Does everyone also know what they are?
   
   
6. How do you get info from the the people working on the project?

Why project managers want information about their projects

• Steer the project
• Control the budget
• Owner wants to know what�s going on
• Figure out when is it done
• When to stop (ripple effect)
• Are we close to hitting our target dates?
• I don�t want to say "I don�t know"
• Manage customer expectations
• Contingency planning
• Manage critical path and risks with critical path
• Who�s playing schedule chicken?
• What�s happening to the people?
• How are we doing with resources?
• Identify other (unknown) dependencies
• How good was my planning?
• Identifying feature (scope) creep

What do managers need to know?

• Are there any hidden sub-projects?
• Are we on schedule?
• Are we, our partners, our customers meeting milestones?
• What of significance is coming up?
• Are we close with estimates/assumptions/interruptions?
• Did we miss somebody important?
• How confident and competent is my project team?
• What are the trends: bug find rate, performance, MTBF, Fault Feedback Ratio
• How am I perceived
• Any personal issues?
• What�s working and not working - how well?
• How much money in the bank and what�s the burn rate?
• Morale, burn rate
• Match between resources available and needed?
• How healthy is the organization?
• What�s the turnover?
• Are tracking our requirements?
• Anything meaningful to celebrate, recognize?
• What are the risks?
• What happened to last week�s risks?
• Are we properly [in]visible?
• What is Sales saying?
• What�s going on outside?
• What�s happening to our capability?

-- JohannaRothman and EstherDerby