Practical Tips

Here are a few practical tips related to monitoring and controlling:

  • Keep your audience in mind: When presenting monitoring information to stakeholders, always keep the audience in mind. When you are communicating with executives, a high-level summary is most useful. When communicating with the people who are actually implementing the project, more detail will be required.
  • Make sure stakeholders can deal with bad news: A monitoring system is only useful if team members are willing and able to respond to the news it provides about project performance, especially when it suggests the existence of serious problems. Make sure everyone on the project team is willing to identify bad news and deal with it as early as possible.
  • Look at the bigger picture: Vital monitoring information sometimes comes from beyond the immediate project. Weather, personnel issues, and the economy can all affect what you hope to accomplish. Take care not to get so focused on the details of incoming monitoring information that you miss the big bigger picture. If that's not your strong suit, remember to check in with team members who are good at seeing the big picture. Understanding what's happening in the regional, national, and global economy, for instance, might help you manage your project.
  • Simplify: A few key metrics are better than too many metrics, which may be confusing and contradictory.
  • Pay attention to non-quantitative measures: Client satisfaction, changes in market preferences, public perceptions about the project, the physical state of team members (Do they appear rested and groomed as usual?), and other non-quantitative measures can tell you a lot about the health of your project and are worth monitoring.
  • Be alert for bias in data collection: Make sure your monitoring systems give you an objective picture of the current state of your project.
  • Be mindful of the effect of contracts on monitoring and controlling efforts: The type of contract governing a project can affect the amount and type of monitoring and controlling employed throughout a project. In a time and material contract, where you get paid for what you do, a contractor will carefully monitor effort because that is the basis of payment. They might not be motivated to control effort because the more they use, the more they are paid. With a lump sum contract, the contractor will be highly motivated to monitor and control effort because compensation is fixed and profit depends largely on effective control.
  • Be sure to communicate key accomplishments, next steps, and risk items: When reading monitoring reports, managers are often looking for just enough information about the project to allow them to feel connected and to allow them to report to the next level up in management. You can make this easier for them by including in your reports a list of deliverables from the last thirty days, a list of what's expected in the next thirty days, and risks they need to be mindful of.

Finally, here are additional helpful suggestions from Gary Whited:

  • Collect actionable information: Focus monitoring efforts on information that is actionable. That is, the information you collect should allow you to make changes and stay on schedule/budget.
  • Keep it simple: Don't set up monitoring and controlling systems that are so complicated you can't zero in on what's important. Simplicity is better. Focus on measures that are key to project performance.
  • Collect valuable data, not easy-to-collect data: Don't fall into the trap of focusing on data that is easy to collect, rather than on data that is tied to an actual benefit or value.
  • Avoid unhelpful measures: Avoid measures that have unnecessary precision, that draw on unreliable information, or that cause excessive work without a corresponding benefit.
  • Focus on changeable data: Take care not to overemphasize measures that have little probability of changing between periods.