Are Your Projects Tracked Instead of Managed?

The word ‘track’ originated in the 15th century; usage of ‘track’ began to take off in the 1950s at a time when the world was recovering from many conflicts and television usage began to rise.

By definition, ‘track’ involves following a course or trail and noting the location at various points. According to?Henri Fayol, "to manage is to forecast and to plan, to organise, to command, to co-ordinate and to control." In other words, managing involves much more than tracking. It takes a lot of effort to make a project run smoothly.

Simply tracking your project portfolio is not enough. Those who have invested in the portfolio are expecting it to create value and provide insights that help them make informed decisions. Managing and controlling the portfolio helps meet those expectations.??Tracking alone does not result in accurate predictions and forecasts.

How can you tell that the project managers contributing to your project portfolio are still growing in their project management maturity? Can you review a work plan and determine if the project is being tracked instead of managed? The most common place to find clues is the work plan, followed by evaluating results and stakeholder impacts.

What Plan?

Over the years, I’ve fine-tuned my ability to pick up a project manager’s work plan and determine if it’s a good one or not. While I’ve been complimented many times as a ‘power user’ of Microsoft Project*, this article is intended to be tool-agnostic.

(*This article is an independent publication and is neither affiliated with, nor authorized, sponsored, or approved by, Microsoft Corporation.)

If the path to the result is more than three weeks long, ask your project managers to show you their work plan. No work plan means nothing to manage or control; your project manager can only tell where their project is today. They have no ability to manage risks, changes, or expectations, much less the path to the result.

If they produce a work plan, you are in good shape, because there are two primary ways to evaluate the quality of the work plan:

?1) Incorrect Tool

Using a tool designed for something other than project management to plan, manage and control project portfolios is remarkably common. A lot of tracking (and likely, not a lot of managing) is going on if the work plan exists in one of four types of great tools:

a) Tabular Data Management tool. Spreadsheets are wonderful for capturing and understanding your data. When I see Microsoft Excel* or similar tools used to create work plans, it is usually in organizations prioritizing budget and cost over scope and schedule, or prioritizing something else over training their project managers in solutions designed to improve their productivity and help them focus on nonadministrative project management activities.

Typically, a work plan in spreadsheet form has calendar weeks as columns and resource names as rows, with hours per week for each resource designated accordingly. Totals by resource and by week are included, along with subtotals and grand totals. Hours are readily converted to costs by applying an hourly rate. CFOs are happy.

Or, portfolio management is simulated with resources as columns, projects as rows, and percent allocation reflected for each resource at cell intersections. Percentages are totaled to ensure each resource is fully allocated. CHROs are happy.

In both scenarios, cost and resource information is disconnected from the work, leaving little or no ability to understand the implications of changes or variances.

Over-allocations abound when ‘tasks’ like vacations, volunteering, and training aren’t reflected, and when basic rules of thumb are not considered (for example, productivity decreases by approximately 25 percent when a third project is assigned to one resource).

b) Workflow Management tool. These tools may be leveraged to either reveal or improve a process, are designed to track ongoing work, and may lack the structure necessary to support a project manager’s responsibility to effectively guide the team towards a result. Workflow management tools are great at supporting a process-improvement project's result.

c) Collaboration tool. There is no denying that collaborating and communication are keys to successful project portfolio management. Using a tool designed only for collaboration focuses primarily on the current activity of the team and tracking related communication and documentation for ease of reference. Better when the project management tool has or integrates seamlessly with a collaboration tool.

d) Ticket management tool. Tools designed to track anything from defects and tasks to issues and risks do just that: track. While capturing estimates and resource assignments may be possible, few are designed to effectively support large, complex projects with durations longer than three weeks, or to create interdependencies that help structure and predict the path to the result.

?2) Right Tool Used Incorrectly

Even when the project portfolio’s work plan is created in a tool that best supports the complex nature of delivering an organization’s strategy, there’s more to discover. A lot of tracking is going on if you have you ever seen a work plan that--

--was updated more than two weeks ago. Pretty Gantt charts gathering digital dust aren’t being used to manage and control progress.

--was abandoned because the portfolio or project manager couldn’t make the tool act like it should. Enterprise-level project portfolio management tools are not easy to learn on the fly. Support your project managers by planning for precise training, followed closely by mentoring to help them apply their training. If you are using Microsoft Project*: know the proper sequence to entering work, resources and interdependencies; and understand the differences between the three task profiles.

--established estimates incorrectly. All resources contributing to the work should be assigned to the work, with the correct allocation. Involve them in creating the estimates for their work; play 'estimate poker'. Have that fun discussion with your teams to understand when they will be out of the office for more than one day, and reflect what you learned in the plan. Use duration- and effort-based estimates appropriately, and understand which estimate is the driver. Let the tool do the work and resist the temptation to manually enter start and finish dates for your estimates (but do enter the actual start and finish dates).

--relies on percent complete only. Projects can be 99 percent complete for a very long time. Reflect actuals, obtain estimates to complete, and assess variances in a timely manner.

--was incomplete. A good rule of thumb: 40 percent of the work is not in the initial draft of the work plan. Review your plan with your stakeholders and your team with the intent of finding that missing work. ?

What Result?

If your project managers are using an agile approach because the stakeholders will only agree the result is what they want when they see it, this section doesn’t apply. If your stakeholders have clearly articulated the result and you find a project in your portfolio that is currently building or testing without a corresponding clearly articulated scope and requirement statement, your ability to predict the quality of the result and the remainder of the path to that result are compromised.?

When did your project managers provide the last communication about the project? Was the project communication read? Understood? Does the project’s status report/kanban board/[pick your tool] only contain information in the “Accomplished” section? We all know that communication is 90 percent of a project manager’s role. No communication about the project's result makes that portion of your portfolio invisible.

What Stakeholders?

Go ahead, pull out that list of your portfolio’s stakeholders and the related know/believe/do information for each stakeholder. Got it? Great! You are very likely to not only obtain stakeholder commitment, but sustain it throughout the life of your project portfolio. Can’t find it? Ugh. Your road to delivering the strategy your project portfolio is designed to achieve will likely be a rockier one. Understanding who is interested in, paying for, and able to disrupt the portfolio’s result is crucial. Without that insight, the portfolio’s landscape is unknown and tracking is likely the only reliable option.

How do you make the distinction between project tracking and managing?

Want to elevate your project management game, learn why I knew I wanted to be a project manager in 8th grade, or meet over coffee? Need a 30-minute free consultation on whatever ails your project??Schedule time with me!

Jan Schiller, ex-PMP, PSM1, FLMI, is a partner with?Berkshire Consulting, LLC. She specializes in revealing the path from where an organization is to where they want to be. Jan delights clients by transforming strategy into results with project management in the financial services, investment, health, beverage, learning management, wholesale printing and life sciences industries. She has helped her clients with the adoption of project management best practices; streamlining business processes; complying with regulations; achieving competitive advantage, innovating effectively, getting things done despite turbulent times, creating a fantastic customer experience, migrating to an industry-standard platform, maximizing productivity, and wrangling projects. In addition to being quoted in?PMNetwork Magazine, she's also discussed how to develop a PMO Project's scope statement on?Phoenix Business RadioX?and contributed to?PMWorld360's digital project management magazine.