Remind, Repeat

Chi-Pong Wong is a seasoned supply chain strategist, program manager, service center manager and relations manager. He has published on leading online magazines and other popular journals. He earned a MA in Economics at SUNY Stony Brook and a MS in Computer Science at Duke University. He can be reached at Linkedin and [email protected].

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

Project control is one of five elements defined in the IPECC project management methodologyadvocated by PMI. Wikipedia described project control as the element of a project that keeps it on track, on time and within budget. This project management piece is perhaps the most difficult component to accomplish because it essentially needs to tame unplanned intrusions of scope changes, budget shortfalls, lost resources and the human factor of forgetfulness--which frequently plays a big, but mostly avoidable, role causing schedule failures and other project maladies.

With skyrocketing project complexity and task owners supporting multiple projects at the same time, project managers can use every bit of help they can muster to ease their project controlling efforts. By leveraging calendar tools, they can help ease project control worries.

Keep reminding task owners until they deliver
Seasoned project managers know that they cannot count on task owners to always remember the dates when they need to deliver on their commitments. The old idiom “out of sight, out of mind” says it well. For complex projects with intertwining dependencies, one small task delay may cause a domino effect and blow the schedule out of the water. Successful project managers need to remind--and keep reminding--task owners on their commitments until they deliver.

This problem can be …

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