Category: 2016

Material published in 2016

Project Tracking: Increase the probability you will achieve your goal

Graph of Actual versus Planned Progress
Graph of Actual versus Planned Progress

How are you getting on with your New Year resolutions? I’m doing pretty well with mine. I’ve been to the gym regularly week since the beginning of January, and several work projects are on track too. I have been “tracking” my achievements.

My question to you is:

“How do you know how well you are getting on?”

Why we need to track our projects

I said earlier that a New Year resolution should be SMART. Two of the letters are M for measurable and T for Time-bounded. If we are going to achieve our goal by the time we have set ourselves then we should be making progress towards it. If we are not making the progress we expect, then maybe we need to take action.
In order to monitor our progress we need to have some sort of tracking. We to be clear about our expectations (Plan) and we need to know what we have achieved (Actual). “Planned versus Actual” is what project tracking is all about, and it is one of the foundations of Project Management.

How do we track our project?

“Project tracking” sounds terribly formal but it doesn’t have to be complicated or bureaucratic. The key elements are “Plan”, “Actual” and periodic checking.

  • The Plan, or expectation of my New Year Resolution is to take “regular exercise, once or twice a week”.
  • The Actual is no more than a word in my (paper) diary.
  • The monitoring is looking at the “ticks” on the last weekend of the month. There is no formal report.

My advice is always to use “the simplest thing which could possibly work”, and to build it into whatever routine you have. Make monitoring and tracking what you do a habit.

Reap the benefits of tracking your work

Monitoring your work and your projects allows you to take control. Don’t assume that you will always be “behind”. Sometimes you will be ahead of where you expect to be and sometimes the problem will not be productivity but the plan.

Start today! A little self-monitoring can increase your feeling of control and allow you to work more effectively.

Project Goals: Improve your New Year Resolutions!

New Year Resolution and project goals
New Year Resolution

January is the month for New Year’s Resolutions. People commit themselves to goals for the coming year. Many resolutions are about becoming healthier, going to the gym and losing weight.

These resolutions are the project objectives of little projects. How effective are they, and how can we make them better?

Constructing our goals

Consultants and psychologists tell us that a good resolution or project objectives should be “SMART”:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Action-Oriented
  • Realistic
  • Time-Bounded

People argue about whether resolutions are a good thing but continue to make them. As a Business Analyst I find myself involved in making project plans. People continue to make project plans, with varying degrees of success.

What is wrong with our resolutions?

One of the problems with objectives is the “Realistic” criterion. If we make it “reasonable” aren’t we just showing lack of imagination? But if we don’t make it “realistic” aren’t we simply setting ourselves up to fail.
I could easily make a resolution:

I will run a marathon by the end of the year.

I really have no way of knowing whether or not that is “realistic”, “reasonable” or even “completely unachievable”. And that brings us to a common problem: we are not very good at estimating how much effort things will take. We start out optimistically with what turn out to be unrealistic expectations. The going gets tough. We beat ourselves up. We give up.

How do we improve our resolutions and project objectives?

The first improvement is to recognise that the “marathon” resolution may not be what we want. Maybe what we want is “to get fitter”. The “marathon” resolution may be SMART, but it may demotivate us. Would we really be disappointed if we were only able to run a half-marathon at the end of the year?
The second improvement is to break the high-level “marathon” goal into smaller, more manageable goals, and then concentrate our energy on the next goal. We can have a goal like “go to the gym every week” and aim to achieve that by the end of January (or whenever).

How do we apply these lessons to our projects?

When we are deciding on our project goals, we can apply the SMART principles to the project as a whole. Make the goal as challenging as you like. I find it useful to break the project into smaller goals. The SMART approach can be applied to each one of these. These smaller goals are easier to manage and more motivating.