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When IT Is Your Company’s “Piggy Bank”
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4 Key Things a Project Manager Must Do
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Essential Project Management
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8 Traits of Top Project Managers - Part 1
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Agile Project Management - Engaging Your Customer!
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9 Tips to Avoid Traps in Project Planning
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Why Projects Succeed - Executive Sponsorship
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On Customer Participation in Agile Projects
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A Project Charter for Lazy Teams
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The Power of Process: How Bad Project Management Kills Great Ideas
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Project Reporting - Introduction
March 4, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Communications Management, Performance Reporting
Project Reporting - Introduction (#15 in the Hut Project Management Handbook)
By Wouter Baars
Crucial decisions must be taken at five points during a project; these decision points correspond to the end of each project phase, and they call for recording the project’s current status and writing an intermediate report. They also provide the opportunity to reconsider the project phases that are yet to come.
At these decision points, project leaders should consult with their clients regarding decisions about the project and adjust the control factors, if necessary.
For example, if many new and unexpected requirements have emerged during the definition phase that could increase the costs considerably, it is useless to proceed with the original budget.
The decision points at the end of the phases are often ‘go/no-go moments’; they call for decisions regarding whether to proceed with the project or whether it should be discontinued.
The following situation often occurs in organisations that do not work according to project phases: a project plan is initially written, in which the control factors are described. A timeline (Time) is specified, and a budget (Money) is prepared, a team is formed (Organisation), a goal is described (Quality) and the tools for information services surrounding the project are determined (Information). During a project, the project leader continues to make sure that the project remains somewhat within the total budget and the timeline, but makes no real adjustments. Near the end of a project, the project proves to cost more or to take longer than originally expected. The project is then scaled back to avoid further cost over-runs or delays.
Unfortunately, the project result suffers.
Had the project leader in such a case worked with the six-phase model, the team would probably have already concluded in the design phase or perhaps even in the definition phase that the original timeline and budget were insufficient. If the project leader had made adjustments at that time, a simpler design could have been chosen that would have been less expensive and time-consuming to implement. Alternatively, more time, money or both could have been requested from the client. At any rate, the status of the project would have been clear months earlier, and it would have been possible to steer the project in a meaningful way.
Next in the Hut Project Management Handbook:
Project Reporting - Uncertainty in Project Plans
Previously in the Hut Project Management Handbook:
Managing a Project - The Information Factor
Wouter Baars has a Master of Science degree in Industrial Engineering and Management Science. He has been a project manager for several years for The European commission, Waag Society, KPN (Dutch telecom provider) and many smaller organizations. He is specialized in creative projects such as serious game development, e-learning and software development. Currently he is teaching project management and coaching organizations that are working on their project management. More info on his work: www.projectmanagement-training.net.
Originally published by DANS – Data Archiving and Networked Services - The Hague
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