I read an interesting tidbit recently: “Parsing” by Clay Johnson (@cjoh), included in Seth Godin’s eBook: What Matters Now. Here’s an excerpt of the tidbit:
How many times have you paid your taxes? Ever get a receipt back telling you what you bought? You’re paying for something, right? Why is everybody arguing about taxes and deficits when they don’t know how their money is being spent?
Imagine if we organized oround meaningful data instead of vapid rhetoric. What if you could see how much you psent on your commute to work this year, or defending your country, or keeping your neighbor healthy?
Most of the data exists and what doesn’t we need to demand. The answer to a healthy democracy lies not in rhetoric, but in our data.
The same logic reaily applies to our projects.
One of the PMBOK’s process groups is Monitoring and Control. Functionally speaking, I think that Monitoring and Control is very closely tied to Managing Communication (PMBOK Knowledge Area). I tend to use the same tools for both.
What your stakeholder needs
Your stakeholder’s needs are reflected in the quote above: “Ever get a receipt back telling you what you bought?” That’s what your Stakeholders are looking for all the way through the project and at project closure: evidence and proof of what they’ve bought. The answer to providing that consistently and clearly is also reflected in teh quote above: “The answer … lies not in rhetoric, but in our data.”
Planning for project control and communication: data
Where is that project data?
That’s up to you. Look at your current projects. Do you know right where that data is: current status, work completed, deliverables, demos, budget info, forecast, etc.? No? Then perhaps you need to plan for the ability to produce and manage that data. Start in your WBS. So many PM’s advise including Project Management deliverables in your WBS. Deliverables like these. You need to plan for exactly what reports are going to be needed to prove what’s been bought, and you need to know where that data is coming from.
If you don’t, then your project status reports and communication will depend on gut checks, guesses, or the latest status you could drag out of your developer at the water cooler that morning, or via text message while you and he both were at different kids’ soccer games the night before.
Project control requires much of the same data. If you can’t communicate these data bits reliably, you’re probably not in control of your project at all. You can’t have control if you have no plan. The plan tells you where you’re supposed to be. If you don’t know where you’re supposed to be, you can’t say whether or not you’re on schedule, on budget, etc. If you can know those answers, then you can probably communicate them easily enough.
In smaller projects (Cottage PM), you can do this really simply. I like the WBS as a core tool. I also like the One Page Project Manager tool by Clark Campbell. It’s a great planning and communication tool for your whole project, all on one page, and easy to update and manage. Maybe I’ll write some more about that tool later.
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