Are You missing this critical piece of your project? Missing – Robert S. Donovan via Flickr I have one item that I want to address today. I would love to hear your examples in comments. This is something I’ve forgotten to do when planning projects in the past and it’s something that I see project managers forget about. It’s easy to point out, but it’s not necessary if you’re not in the pit with alligators. Monitor & Control Work Appropriately. I was once in a situation when the scope of my project was constantly changing. This happens to all projects, regardless of their size or complexity. It’s a natural process. This one was especially bad. I was curious to know how much time was spent on replening activities. How much time did the other project managers spend? ?The project controllers? ? Myself? What is all this re-planning going to cost us in terms time, dollars, quality? The obvious was immediately apparent to me. The project team was also affected. They had to re-estimate tasks and consider the impacts of the changes. Every step of the process. ?Where was this track? Nowhere. Yikes! Iain Farrell via Flickr Nowhere. Project Planning. This is a common error when creating a WBS or defining the scope for your project. Sure, your WBS has a “project management” section at level 2. Do engineers get charged for this if their attention is diverted from getting things done and instead goes to project management related activities. The time they spend on re-planning is deducted from time they would have spent designing, writing code, or doing any other job related to your project. If they properly record the time, you can use it. It’s a wasted opportunity if they charge it as normal work. But why track it anyway? I don’t advocate that you track it just for the sake. Only track what makes sense. This gives you some benefits that you might want to consider:

• It allows you to see the impact of re-planning on your project. This will allow you to see the impact on schedule, budget, quality by not hiding the diverted work.
• It allows you to manage your stakeholders. It can provide data on past impacts to project work that result from large scope changes. This will help you ensure that change requests are only submitted and approved when the value is greater than the costs.
• This helps you make better estimates for the future. Knowing what it takes to respond to scope change can help you plan better.

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