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Identifying and Tracking Unknowns on Your Project

April 6, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Requirements Management

Identifying and Tracking Unknowns on Your Project
By Richard Morreale

“Knowing what we don’t know and tracking it is the only way to ensure that eventually we know what we don’t know. Understand?”

There are things that we know we don’t know and then there are things that we don’t know we don’t know. Got it. Well the latter situation – things we don’t know we don’t know – will, during the project, eventually take us by surprise and as the project manager we will need to handle those things and get them taken care of. After all, that’s one of the things the project manager is there for – to ensure that challenges that come up during the project are met.

The first situation, however, – those things that we know we don’t know – need to be identified and tracked. I have found that in most cases these things come up while we are working with the client to identify their requirements. As we work with the client in producing the requirements we are told that they don’t know the answers to some of our questions. These are things that we need to know to truly understand what the Client wants.

I believe that in most cases the information is either really known by someone in the client’s organization or it would not take much work to get the answer. So what should you do? Well, you should push as much as you can to get all the information you need. Having said that, you need to understand that some things really are not known at the beginning of the project. In these cases, you need to make sure that you establish a database to manage these unknowns.

The database should include at least the following for each unknown:

  • Title of the unknown
  • Unknown description
  • The project event by when it will be known
  • Who is responsible for providing the information
  • The risk associated with the unknown
  • The mitigation action to be taken
  • Comments

Each Unknown should be reflected in your project plan along with who is responsible and when they will have the information. These Unknowns should then be monitored and tracked as any other activity in the project plan. If you do this and do this properly, you will soon know what you don’t know. Get it?

Richard is an extremely experienced Program Manager, Professional Speaker and company executive of Inspiration Systems, Ltd. Richard can: Manage your biggest project, speak at your next meeting or conference, rescue any of your projects that are in trouble, help your project managers be better project managers, help your project managers make their certification work better for them, help your company enhance performance and increase production. He is also the Author of Over 50 Killer Ideas for Delivering Successful Projects. Buy it at www.buymorreale.com or Contact Richard at www.richardmorreale.com or 336 499 6677.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 and is filed under Requirements Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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