The activities of your implementation project won’t always happen in the way or at the time that you plan them to. The way to counteract the difficulties that arise from these diversions from your plan lies in the way that you create and use your implementation project monitoring and control system. When created and used with care, this system will identify the project’s drifts and divergences and provide you with what you need to put your project back ‘on line’.
When you monitor your project you’ll measure, record, collate and analyse data about its activities. This data will tell you things like whether a particular activity is on schedule or whether it is delayed. In more sophisticated monitoring systems, it will also tell you about the cost and resource usage of activities and whether — or not — these are in line with your budgeted usage. It is important that this data is both relevant and credible as well as being timely and understandable. To be effective, your project monitoring must provide you with active information. Not only must it give you the answers to questions such as ‘Is this activity on schedule?’, ‘Have we overspent the project budget?’ or ‘What is the project’s probable finish date?’ — it must also tell you about the where and when of your project’s drifts and deviations. For, when you have this information, then you can move on to another vital element in the management of your implementation project — that of controlling it.
Project control is aimed at reducing the gap between what is actually happening and what you planned should happen. As such, it is rooted in the data generated by your project monitoring. To be effective, its actions should be appropriate, quick and cost-effective. Getting these actions right can take real skill and judgement — because there’s often never enough data or time. But whatever you do, it must be based on what facts you have — rather than on your opinions — and be targeted solely towards keeping the project in line with your plan.
Once your implementation project is under way, once itsmonitoring and controlling systems are active, you’ll soon come across another of the factors that is crucial to its success — that of effective communication.
Most of this communication is about the what, how and why of the project’s progress, and most of it involves passing information to people who aren’t actively involved in the implementation project. One of the ways that you can do this is by progress reports. These need to be issued regularly, though they can also be issued when a special event or problem warrants it. Their primary purpose is to report the general progress of the project and so they should be understandable, concise and based on facts. They are generally read by busy people, so brevity is also desirable. Supporting data, where required, should be nested in appendices. Routine progress reports — in the form of tables of figures, Gantt charts or Activity on Arrow networks — should be presented with limited comment. These reports are often complementary to another method of reporting project progress — that of the project meeting.
Project meetings are important. They are the arena within which the people with a direct interest in the project’s progress exert their influence. As such they, like the negotiations that preceded them, possess a considerable potential for conflict and disagreement. Because of this, your project meetings must be conducted in ways that are clearly and effectively focused on the achievement of results and targets. Managing a project meeting that achieves these objectives represents a real skill on the part of the project manager, and agendas — that state the business to be discussed, minutes — that briefly record what was decided and who is to do what, and briefing papers, such as project progress reports — all play their part in this. The best project meetings are brief — no longer than 11/2 hours — and events from which you and the other side emerge better informed about the project, having been involved in decisions on key project issues and with a better understanding of your and their role in the implementation project. These meetings should involve no more than ten people and should be chaired with skill and sensitivity. In the end, a project meeting is only as good as the people who attend. If the meeting is to be valuable and effective, then these people must be willing to engage in a constructive dialogue with each other. Given that, and an experienced and capable chairperson, the meetings of your project will help your monitoring and your controlling.
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