Fail to Succes — How to keep your project on track?
Imagine just a second, building your cottage house (the lucky ones). The following steps are coordinating construction, site clearance, foundation, brick masonry work, roofing, right? Then one day, out of the blue, you have been informed that there was no plumbing and drainage system in your house.
If you would see the signals of your construction project derail, you may take corrective action. It is too late for the house, however, we could still have time for projects. The missing part was that one of the important phases of project management; Monitor and Control.
Monitor and Control is a broad word, let's narrowed it just for this case. How do you control your project? There are certain ways I am using, and I would like to share my experience in a brief. If you have more curiosity about project management methodologies, let me google that for you.
Protect your Critical Path
Not all tasks are of equal importance and are not finished at a dedicated time. It is a fact that there will be leads and lags. However, the important one is to defend your critical path that has a direct impact project timeline than others. Critical Path should be defined in the planning phase. These activities are must-done activities for project realization. With any delay, you are easily off track. In the end, Close tracking Critical Path leads you to deliver results.
How To?: Use PERT and event chain methodology.
Keep in mind project objectives and phase gates
Here is our famous soft ability drive-in; Result Oriented. What are your project KPIs; purpose and scope for the project, budget limit, resource, quality, technical requirements? You can easily get lost in Day-to-day project tracking, even if you know all these metrics. Your core team most apparently has other tasks than your project (if you are not using Scrum). So, Team members easily distract and forget what should be done. It is your job to be remembered it. Weekly Meetings are a great reminder, however, the real accelerator is Phase Gates! Phase Gates helps you out with what should be done before the next step. All milestone metrics are holistically shaping your current status. The deviations could be seen at your milestone meetings and weekly progress regularly.
How to? : Milestone Meetings, Monthly Reporting, and Weekly Core team meetings.
Last but not least, the most important one, IMHO, is no need to introduce; Constant Feedback. Two-way communication output is the most valuable signal of your project is off track. There are other indicators you should be aware of course. Do you have any advice, let me know in the comments!
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