After a successful planning process, the progress of the projects needs to be closely monitored. Any deviations from the original plan (or baseline) need to be identified and managed to keep the project within scope, on time, and within budget. This is the sixth article in my “project inefficiencies” article series.
To deliver a successful project, some monitoring of progress is needed to ensure that the team is progressing according to plan. Personally, I prefer to use "burn-down" or "burn-up" charts that show progress over time. There are of course many other – more sophisticated –progress tracking methods such as burned-rate analysis and earned-value analysis. They are very powerful but require more data to show meaningful results, which is often a challenge for project teams.
Surprisingly, I have not seen many projects with a proper progress tracking culture. One reason might be cost-cutting measures affecting all support functions who could collect the necessary data and create graphs, statistics or even presentations. But I am sure there are also other reasons.
As a result, I question if the majority of project managers has a good enough understanding of the status of their projects.
I would like to share the challenges most project managers experience when it comes to progress tracking in large scale, international IT projects:
- Often the project status is reported via ample colors (red, amber, green) but without proper progress tracking explaining the color. Such reporting is based on feelings, not facts. As consequence, all corrective actions within these projects are also just based on feelings, raising the question how target-oriented these corrective actions will be in the end.
- When tracking the progress of teams, I see every now and then a planning graph such as the graph below. After a long period of limited progress, all results are achieved just right before the deadline. The graph basically looks like the “Eiger Nordwand”. While not many people are fit enough to climb the Eiger Nordwand, the same is true for such steep ascents in projects. So far, I have not seen any team really successfully delivering a project based on such a curve.
- My experience is also that project managers leave it to each stream lead to report progress without guidance to what he or she as a project manager wants to see. Then it is up to the stream lead to create the necessary information, resulting in individual progress tracking without a consistent methodology across the project.
- My favorite excuse is the “there is nothing to track”-excuse. The team will work for weeks and months without any meaningful result, therefore no tracking can be set up…
- On the other side, there are often complains that progress tracking is too detailed and too much effort is spent in its creation. I usually refer to the picture of a pilot when this comes up. A pilot (always) needs instruments to fly a plane. There might be a (very experienced) pilot who can fly without much technical support (for a while at least) – but it would definitely not be safe. I believe we live – especially when managing large IT projects – in a very complex world. We need all the instruments we can get to explain our world, see where we’re going and make sure we take the right decisions.
- Large IT projects are simply too complex to take decisions based on feelings (and experience) instead of facts.
What can a project manager do to handle these challenges?
- The project manager should have a clear vision which instruments he/she needs in order to manage and lead the project. Therefore, he/she should give clear instructions which KPIs and progress tracking is required and expected. If necessary, the project manager and the stream lead meet to define which facts (or units) can be counted and tracked.
- It is clear that effort must be spent on progress tracking. But I agree that the effort must be balanced. The boundary between necessary and exaggerated effort is narrow and must be well explained by the project manager towards clients and sponsors.
- Additionally, I believe that different project management styles require different progress tracking strategies. Every project manager needs to find his or her “tracking match”.
- With increasing experience, the effort that has to be invested in tracking decreases. But I think there is no level of experience that makes tracking completely superfluous.
- Last but not least, I believe that reliable plans (and curves) result in constant output. My preferred progress tracking graphs look as below. The challenge is to adapt the execution to the shape of the graph or, if this does not work, to plan the right corrective actions.
