Manage Project Progress

Reading: Manage project progress

Manage project progress

Inside this reading:

The control phase of a project

Establishing a project monitoring and control system

Managing changes

Methods used to monitor projects

Team communication and gathering project data

Periodic reporting

Monitoring tools and software

Controlling the project

Schedule control

Task and team management

Quality control

Control tools and software

Assessing and implementing change

Changes to project scope

Steps in change control

Reporting

Status and progress reports

Structure and format of reports

Templates, checklists and document control

Summary

The control phase of a project

The control phase of a project involves the main activities listed in Table 1.

Table 1: Summary of project phases, with control phase shaded

Although this project phase is known as the ‘control’ phase, control processes have been at work since the planning stages and will continue through to the end. In this topic we’ll see how controlling the progress and direction of the project happens in a cycle, and how it requires willing contributions from all the team.

Every member of the project team shares accountability for checking, controlling, reporting and integrating work. The key to success will be your ability to handle the day-to-day pressures of what can happen with:

• Resources—people, equipment, materials
• Time—are tasks taking longer or less than expected? Will you be able to deliver on time?
• Money—do you have enough cash flow? Are there unexpected costs?
• Changes—when events lead either you or the client to request a change in the project’s scope.

No doubt you can see that these elements are inter-related, and a change in one generally affects another. For example, someone gets sick, and you can’t get a replacement on time, the task takes longer than expected so the schedule is put behind. It won’t make the client happy, so you’ll need to do something!

Avoiding project failure

There can be many reasons a project fails. However, failure often relates to:

• the support or otherwise of upper management in an organisation
• lack of ongoing support from project sponsor/steering committee
• the quality of the project management; ignoring standard project management processes
• a project manager selected for seniority rather than appropriate skills
• lack of dedicated team effort.

Some large organisations have a project management office to handle projects and processes. Yet for managing a simple project, avoiding project failure includes the use of templates, best practices, standards, guidelines, and policies, much of which is behind the work of monitoring and control discussed in this reading.

We will look in more detail at the control phase activities in the following sections. Communicating and leading are very important, but you also need to use controlling skills to keep the project on track.

In the end, as the adage has it, ‘projects don’t fail; people do’. In many cases, project managers are unprepared for their role. They aren’t professionally trained, and don’t manage what they are doing. A good project leader needs strong interpersonal, technical and administrative skills.

Establishing a project monitoring and control system

As the project manager, you are responsible for ensuring that the project goal and objectives are met. Systems for monitoring and controlling the project are established early and can be found in such things as the project plan, communications plan and contracts.

Control, like quality assurance, is ongoing. It can be achieved by comparing the planned status of the project to its actual status, to then if necessary take corrective action. You may need to modify work, objectives and expenditure to complete the project successfully. This can involve making changes to the original plan, which is a normal part of managing projects.

The development of a project can be thought of as a cycle of monitoring, controlling and directing work. You can see this in Figure 1. It will be useful for you to refer back to this figure as you work through the topic.

Figure 1: Project monitoring and control processes

Monitoring progress to plan for deviation

All aspects of the project need to be monitored. In particular, you’ll be checking:

• that all tasks are being completed as planned, on time and with appropriate quality
• any deviations from the project plan are accounted for
• that milestones on the plan are being reached on time
• that contracted work is progressing according to agreements
• where the major hold-ups are if the schedule is slipping; if enough slack has been allowed
• any problems with costs; if cash flow is sufficient; if costs are affected by any slippage in the schedule.

Successful project management is a process of checks and balances. You are checking the flow of progress, and balancing where extra motivation is needed. Monitoring requires careful listening, watching, analysis and mutual support for everyone on the team.

You especially need to know of any deviation from the plan as soon as possible. You can use a number of tools or methods for this, which you’ll learn about in the next section. Everyone on the project team must have access to monitoring tools to clearly see the project status and direction; how progress and changes influence their own work and the work of others on the team. When monitoring reveals warning signs, the team can then work together to ensure a remedy.

Managing changes

A project is often an agreement to develop and deliver a thing that hasn’t before been built or provided. The team must solve unfamiliar and unexpected problems. The risk in this must be managed. Some projects start to drift slowly off course, degree by degree. Other projects run completely out of control (but thankfully, not many). Many projects suffer the pain of a thousand frustrating changes.

Projects can change in structure, size and character. There can be modifications and wholesale changes to features, timing, budget, work plans, priorities and people on a project. Good management can sometimes control this. For example, if a project manager knows in advance that a delivery will be late the sequence of work on other tasks might be adjusted so that the project schedule isn’t affected.

Some changes are unavoidable and unpredictable—if a key programmer on a software project suddenly falls ill at a critical time, all you might do is send a get-well card and start looking for a replacement! As you watch the project progress, there will be many incidents, concerns, and an array of problems that creep into the work. They all need to be managed.

Monitoring and control measures, while sometimes annoying, can have a positive side. As work goes ahead, the team can use them to find newer and better ways of doing things that were not obvious when the project plan was drafted. Shortcuts and other efficiencies can compensate for losses elsewhere.

Change and risk assessment

Some known risks to project success will have been identified and assessed in the planning phase. Yet mistakes and unexpected things can happen at any time once a project is underway. What’s more, changes that you make can expose new hazards! Power cuts, temporary loss of access to the Internet, illness, loss of staff to another more urgent project, hardware failure, even bad weather—are all largely unpredictable events.

Constant risk awareness and trust

The project manager needs to daily appraise the team’s readiness to avoid or respond to problems. A manager should try to get a clear assessment of potential risks at team meetings. Getting warning of risks is more likely if team members are comfortable reporting individual difficulties, rather than hiding them and hoping they will evaporate. Team members should be secure in the knowledge that if they draw attention to problems they will not be criticised.

Methods used to monitor projects

Ways of monitoring the project’s progress should be set out in the project plan and should include:

• discussion with members of the project team
• getting regular reports from team members
• actual observation of work in progress
• taking measurements and comparing them to the plan
• using project management software and other tools to produce reports
• review of all reports and documentation
• feedback from users and stakeholders.

Team communication and gathering project data

You’ll need to establish concise guidelines for getting the information you need from your team members. Details of a communication plan may include:

• by what means you’ll get feedback from staff and contractors
• the reports that will be collected and distributed
• the frequency of meetings
• how progress will be reviewed and reported
• any other documentation that needs to be created.

Meetings and forums

Commonly, communication with team members will be via email or group-ware. However, regular meetings (which can also be held by phone conference, video conference or on-line), are also an important way of gathering information.

Successful meetings need good planning, such as plenty of notice and detail about what will be discussed. This gives team members an opportunity to prepare their contributions. Project team meetings should be held mainly to:

• share information
• solve problems
• make decisions
• evaluate various aspects of the project.

Progress should be discussed, as well as documented. Progress meetings give the team a forum to interact with people with whom they may not otherwise have regular contact.

Typical agenda items might include a discussion of:

• handovers (where finished work is reported and new work allocated)
• schedules
• individual workloads
• the status of deliverables and milestones
• the status of contract work
• delays (causes and strategies to deal with)
• changes and how they will be implemented.

Walking around

Frequent personal contact with team members is one of the best ways of getting information about what is happening on a project. Management by Walking Around (MBWA) can be highly effective at gathering data and testing its validity.

One idea behind this is that in most interpersonal work situations, such as a project, most of the time you only see what the other person wants you to see. Since they know your expectations, they will manage their presentation to satisfy you. On the other hand when you walk around, you get to see what people are actually doing.

You can practice MBWA by:

• consistently making time to visit project team members and being available for impromptu and informal discussions
• getting away from your own desk, and learning first-hand about problems and concerns
• mentoring team members with new methods to manage particular problems.

Collecting and collating information

Collecting and collating information about a project is one of the many crucial jobs the project manager must direct. In an early team meeting, the group will decide:

• the extent or scope of measurements to be recorded
• who captures each element of detail about the project
• how each measurement is to be made
• when the information is captured
• how to store results (electronically or in hard copy)
• where to store data
• what format to use for the data.

Information from team members, suppliers and contractors must be constantly checked, analysed and confirmed. In the project planning phase estimations for likely costs, probable task times, expected scope, anticipated delivery dates and so on, will have used the best numbers available. As the project moves forward, those numbers are adjusted using information gathered by the team as to actual numbers.

Progress indicators and measurement

Choosing the right indicators of project progress is essential to evaluating progress. Indicators need to:

• be relevant to the particular project
• be easily understandable to everyone interested in the project
• be easily measured
• provide reliable information.

An indicator can be as simple as a list on a whiteboard showing the date and the work that should be done that day, or as complex as a statistical comparison of one project with another.

Quantitative indicators use some sort of numeric measurement (it’s easy to remember this as it has ‘quantity’ in it). Examples include the number of faults per 1,000 products produced, the number of dollars expended, or the number of people working on a task.

Qualitative indicators are more subjective, and refer to feelings and descriptive judgments. For example, if you’re working on one of the project tasks, you might say that progress on the task was ‘slow’, or ‘we’re really making great progress’—which would be a qualitative assessment.

Progress can be measured in different ways by different specialists. An accountant may be mostly interested in financial aspects. A programmer may be interested in the number of lines of code finished. The head of the department, with three other projects waiting to start, may have time as their main interest.

Most of the indicators in a project should have been firmly decided in the planning stage. There may also be legal requirements, or particular client specifications that make measurements an important part of monitoring progress. For example, you may have a certain number of files to create, or web pages to develop, or rooms to install, etc.

Measurements are tangible evidence of what’s happening in a project, while providing a measure of progress can be difficult for project team members. Programmers and technicians, for instance, when trying to solve complex problems, might be distracted from problem solving by having to measure and record progress.

Ways to make measuring and recording progress easier, and to ensure it is meaningful, include:

• motivating the team on the value of measurement
• reducing the amount of work they have to do to capture vital statistics
• showing the team how their measurements are used to bring the project to success
• identifying when facts and figures are best gathered and collated.

Sample measurements (metrics)

The word ‘metric’ simply refers to the particular measurement being used, and any useful value in a project can be used. The dashboard of your car is a good way to think about metrics. It provides you with useful information such as how fast you are going, how much petrol you have in the tank, even sometimes how efficiently your car is running. In the same way, you should use metrics that give you information about how your project is going.

Some examples include:

• staffing levels (comparing estimated and actual)
• percentage of tests that have passed/task completed
• estimated versus actual duration between major milestones
• the number of tasks planned and completed.

Percentage completion

Percentage completion is an often-used metric. We can apply this to particular tasks, or we can use it as an indicator of the total number of tasks that have been completed, depending on the way the project is structured.

An example is illustrated in Table 1. A graphics company has a contract to produce 500 images for a training project. Each image is designed, drawn, checked, corrected and checked again. For any one image (or group of images), you could specify their status as a percentage completed. If the design is finished, you could say that this task was, say 25% complete. Similarly, you could record this for each image and summarise it in a spreadsheet. Or you might be interested in how many of the images were completely done. For example, if 250 of the images have gone from design to the final check, a useful measure of progress would that the entire project is 50% complete.

Table 2: Project progress (100 graphics per set)

Benchmarks and objective measurement

A benchmark is a comparison against which project progress can be measured or judged. Project managers sometimes measure performance by accepted industry standard benchmarks. Comparing one project with a similar project can encourage practices (best practice) to improve performance. There is no fixed rule for benchmarks.

Data capture needs to be objective—what you collect, and how you test the data should not be distorted by personal bias. As a particular example, project team members may be embarrassed about tasks taking longer than they should and therefore may report further progress than is the case.

Periodic reporting

The usual way to monitor and track progress is through a system of periodic reporting. Typically, this type of report identifies the status of every activity in the project for that period as well as for the entire project. Variations from the project plan can then be picked up by using information on activities and resources. These sorts of reports can greatly help in making decisions because they are usually in a concise format and are easy to read.