By now the team are working through their assignments and some tasks are likely to be ahead of schedule and some are probably falling behind. On thing you can be sure of is that the project is not running exactly to the plan you started with. That is why it is called a plan! Allied to this other problems or issues maybe emerging that you had not anticipated. In this fourth stage we will help you understand the steps needed to track where the project is now at and then to re-plan and then to communicate this information back out. In brief we suggest that you follow these high level steps at this stage of project management:

• (i) Check and understand the project's progress
• (ii) Find and Manage Exceptions (e.g. issues, risks and change requests)
• (iii) Re-Plan the project

(i) Check and understand the project's progress

By fair means or foul you as the Project Manager need to figure where the project is at before you re-plan. You need to find out what tasks are ahead of schedule and what tasks are falling behind. Here are three simple ways that you may be able to get this information.

(a) Virtual Check

Rather than calling everyone to get status you should be able to examine the various (project, issue, work, resource) reports on the project site - assuming you have a collaborative project site setup. If your Team Members are following the simple guidelines in Stage 3 of this guide then you will have plenty of project updates to review from the comfort of your own desk. A sample set of reports to review in the project site might be as follows:

• Home Page to get a quick project overview
• Overdue Work
• Work by Assigned To
• The full Task List (in a Gantt view)
• Resource utilization view
• Issue report
• Optionally check your own work!!!

(b) Individual Check

MBWA - Managing by walking about is one of the oldest forms of management. Literally walk about or phone about and talk to the Team Members and Customers to get their take on the project status.

 

(c) Team Check

You do not want to have project meetings for the sake of meetings - so you do need to be careful with how these are run. Here is a sample agenda you might consider:

First … Review, discuss and resolve (in so far as possible) any open issues

• Project meetings can easily get derailed and run over time - so it is key to use the "together time" to problem solve as a team on key issues before the project meeting time is used up. Not all issues will be resolved at the weekly project meeting - but discussing the issues will at least open the issues for the Team Members to think about as the week progresses.

Second … Look at upcoming tasks for next week

• It is good to look at what is up next. It makes people aware and helps the team focus on the essential work for the coming week. While the team are together it is also a good time to get the varied inputs of Team Members on key upcoming tasks.

Third … (time permitting) Look at tasks achieved last week or at least the highlight tasks from last week

• Most project meetings over-run in our experience! You need to be a really organized meeting facilitator to have meetings start and finish on time. So if we know that project meetings will over-run - even if we do not like to admit this - then we should not start the meeting with this item - as Team Members will tend to enjoy talking about what was achieved last week - and this may eat most of the meeting. So consider keeping this item to last.

• It is clearly not critical to follow this exact agenda - as you as a Project Manager will develop your own style. However it is important to have some sort of a standard agenda - or the meeting will not be efficient or effective. You want meetings to be both, for your own sake as a Project Manager, but also so that the meetings give energy to and do not take energy away from Team Members. So many meetings are a drag - the last thing you want to do is de-motivate and de-energize your Team Members because you are running poor meetings!

(ii) Find and Manage Exceptions (e.g. issues, risks and change requests)

Now you know where the project is at but you are not ready to re-plan just yet! At this stage there maybe outstanding exceptions to deal with. Exceptions on a project may come in many forms but issues, risks and change requests are the most common. You will want to find a resolution to any open issues you can as this will remove road-blocks to progress and the resulting resolution may need to go on your updated plan. Similarly you will need to look at open risks and decide if you need to plan actions to mitigate so the risks do not take place. In some cases the risk will have happened as you thought they might, so you will need to add contingency steps to the updated plan. You may also have received a project change request formally or informally. In this case you need to review this and decide what to do. Of course you may need to consult your team members and also possibly your project sponsors to see what course they advise or authorize. Either way the result of the change request analysis my well dictate how you re-plan your project, so best to know this before you start the re-planning in earnest. In summary then exceptions can change the project more than you might like, so it is best to figure what to do with these exceptions before you start into the next step, re-planning.

(iii) Re-Plan the project

Some projects are so busy that the Project Manager does not have time to re-plan the project unless a specific time is set aside to do this re-planning. Some Project Managers are natural re-planners and do it every day as the project progresses. Styles and personalities also come into play. Some people like change and love re-planning and some decidedly do not! Here are three sub-steps you might consider for the re-plan step - whether you do it as you go or at a set time every week.

(a) Re-assign work and send notifications

By this stage you now have enough information to re-plan the project. In reality you were probably making changes as you went along - but now you need to make all the remaining changes you know about before you re-publish or re-communicate the plan.

• Project Redefinition
  • The project is defined and laid out in a series of artifacts, e.g. the Project Statement, a task list, etc. Update each of these that are probably implemented as lists in the project site. On smaller projects you will have a small amount of updates to do and on a larger project way more work of course. In some ways it is as simple as walking down through the lists in the project site and making adjustments. After all you decided in "Stage 1 - Initiate the Project" on how to manage the project. Now you need to adjust the contents of these artifacts.

• Project re-assignments
  • Now that the structure of your project is changed you may need to reassign work to different Team Members. You may for example need to find and fix any over assignments.

• Notifications
  • Check to ensure that the changes just made are getting out through the notifications mechanisms setup earlier in "Stage 2 - Plan and Setup the Project".

(b) Report to and Work with the Appropriate Stakeholders

Now that the changes are made you may need to report to and work with your stakeholders. Your project sponsor will need to know what changes are afoot and it is best that the news comes directly from you, the Project Manager. This may involve some of the following:

• Deliver Periodic Status Reports (Printed or emailed)
• Raise Exceptions including Project Change Requests, Top Issues and Top Risks
• Resolve Sponsor Level Issues and apply the resolution through Re-Plan Project (if appropriate)

(c) Tailor the project site to match the evolving needs of the project

In "Stage 1 - Initiate the Project" you decided how best to approach managing the project. As the project progresses and changes you may decide to change how you manage the project. Maybe you decided not to manage risks very formally and perhaps you now believe that the project is changing at a pace that is not healthy - so perhaps you now introduce risk management. Or perhaps you decided to manage with issues, risks and change requests and now that you are well started the project you realize that this was too much project management for this project. In this case you scale back the amount of project management you use. As you periodically re-plan the project you will do well as a Project Manager to ensure you have the right amount of project management for the project in hand.