BUS605: Strategic Project Management

Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden not a benefit.

 – William Pollard

Learning Objectives

After reading this lesson, you will be able to

• Explain the importance of designing good monitoring practices
• Describe elements of effective project monitoring and controlling
• Understand how to decide what to monitor and when, and list some useful items to monitor
• Distill monitoring information into reports that are useful to different stakeholders
• Describe features of a good project dashboard
• Compare pure, instinctual intuition to informed intuition
• Explain how linearity bias can mislead assessment of project progress

The Big Ideas in this Lesson

• As a project manager, you have to balance looking through the front window to see where the project is headed with well-timed glances at the dashboard, while occasionally checking your rearview mirror to see if you might have missed something important.
• Different types of projects require different approaches to monitoring, analytics, and control. But any technique is only useful if it enables you to learn and respond. An excessive focus on measurement, without any attempt to learn from the measurements, is not useful.
• When reporting on the health of their projects, successful project managers tailor the amount of detail, the perspective, and the format of information to the specific stakeholders who will be consuming it.
• Gut instinct, or pure intuition, can make you vulnerable to the errors caused by cognitive biases. Instead, aspire to informed intuition, a combination of information and instinctive understanding acquired through learning and experience.

Source: Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/technicalpm/chapter/project-monitoring-analytics-and-control/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.