Your Project GPS

Projects@Work - February 17, 2010

Stakeholder Management ProjectsAtWork

To know where you're at, give your projects a disciplined status process that fulfills these five characteristics.

Running a project is like piloting a plane. The baseline plan is a flight plan, mapping out the route to the destination. The pilot uses a GPS navigation system to determine the plane’s position and whether it is on course. Similarly, a project manager needs a GPS to determine where his project is. Status monitoring is part of a project’s GPS system. It distributes “position fix” information, increases accountability, illuminates obstacles, and improves communication.

Jeff Oltmann of Synergy Professional Services says good status processes share these characteristics:

> Simple: Gathering information and administering the system is not a huge burden. Status summaries are easy to read and understand.

> Consistent: The process is applied consistently across projects and over time. Otherwise, no one will take it seriously. Consistency is easier to achieve using a simple status montoring process.

> Public: Appropriate status is easily available to everyone so they can use it to inform their actions and make good decisions.

> Inclusive: All projects, regardless of type, use the status process, scaled appropriately for each project’s size and complexity. This is …

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